Google is killing yet another service: the Google URL Shortener. As Dare Obasanjo comments on X, any links using the goo.gl shorter will break after August 25, 2025.
When Google offers a service, millions of people use it and it becomes embedded in every corner of the internet — and then when Google kills a service, countless things break, and it causes a whole lot of inconvenience for a whole lot of people.
Unfortunately, Google doesn’t seem to concern itself with this pattern, and now it’s killing the URL shortener just like it killed the One VPN service, the Google Podcasts app, the Google Hangouts app, and many others.
And yes, the correct term is “killing,” not “sunsetting.” Oh, and if you’re wondering what else Google has killed over the years, there’s a website for that.
Google continues its epic run of reminding people why you should never depend on their services.
They just announced that links that used https://t.co/nvVaUJ4zXM* shortener will break after August 25th 2025.
You’d think Google of all companies would respect not breaking links. pic.twitter.com/96mjAauLep
— Dare Obasanjo🐀 (@Carnage4Life) July 19, 2024
Now, technically the Google URL Shortener service has been dead for a while — it stopped letting people create new links in 2018. However, in that announcement post, it did also say “while most features of goo.gl will eventually sunset, all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.” That’s Google’s bolding, not mine.
Fast forward six years, however, and Google is now telling us all our shortened links are going to return 404s after August 25, 2025. Well, great, thanks Google.
To make the transition easier for us, from next month on, goo.gl links will start displaying an interstitial page when you click them, reminding you that they’re going to break in a year. Except that those interstitial pages will probably break any redirect flows and mess with social metadata, so — well, those particular links will just break next month, I guess.
On a serious note, if you still have any goo.gl links lying around for whatever reason, you can use one of the many other link-shortening services out there to replace them or just leave them long if you’re concerned about their security. And do it soon, because interstitial page or no, people are bound to forget about it if they leave it too long.