Back in 2018, Google officially announced that it was shutting down its shortened links goo.gl. New link creation, as well as analytics and management, ended a year later for all the users. Now in an official blog post, Google has announced that any links in the https://goo.gl/ format will respond with a 404 error after August 25th, 2025.
Google stated, “In 2018, we announced the depreciation and transition of Google URL Shortener because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL Shortening services that emerged in that time. This meant we no longer accepted new URLs to shorten but that we would continue serving existing URLs. Today the time has come to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener.”
The company mentioned that starting from August 23, 2024, goo.gl links will start displaying an interstitial page for a percentage of existing links notifying users that the link will no longer be supported after August 25th, 2025 prior to navigating to the original target page. Google will continue to display this interstitial page until the shutdown date.
Google has also warned the developers that this interstitial page might cause disruptions in the current flow of their goo.gl links. Hence the developers are encouraged to update the impacted links as soon as possible to avoid inconvenience in the future.
Here are a few alternatives of goo.gl
- Bitly
- TinyURL
- Rebrandly
- BI.ink
- Ow.ly
- Short.io
- Sniply
