You may have seen links that start with goo.gl/* before, but these link will soon cease to function from August 25, 2025 onwards. The URL is part of Google’s URL Shortener service, which the company will soon deprecate, and joins the long list of the services and feature that is infamously referred as “Google Graveyard.”
Google URL Shortener’s Inevitable Shutdown

Currently, if you access any goo.gl links, you may be greeted with an interstitial page that notifies users of the deprecation (Google says this applies to “a percentage of existing links”). You can then click “Continue” to head to the intended destination page as usual. Alternatively, you can append “si=1” query param on the URL to skip this message.
This technically isn’t news to everyone – since 2018, Google has officially transitioned away from goo.gl links and redirected users to use its then-new Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL), which is also getting deprecated soon. Google says the changing landscape of the web has ultimately negates the need for its URL shortener service, especially as competitors have since taken over to serve the internet, including Bitly and TinyURL.
Google’s own URL shortening service was born out of necessity, however. Before Elon Musk took over Twitter and renamed it into his favorite letter, the social media platform had a very restrictive character limit of 140 characters (which was doubled to 280 in the years since, and up to 10,000 if you pay for its premium subscription). This means URLs has to be as short as possible to avoid taking too much characters.
However, shutting down all goo.gl links will cause a phenomenon called “link rot”. Essentially, many unmaintained resources on the Internet may stop working as the links never get updated with active service, which can render information inaccessible. Google is giving everyone up to one year to update links via third-party shortener service, but it’s inevitable that millions of links may become broken once the deadline hits.
Pokdepinion: It’s pretty rare to find goo.gl links these days, so hopefully the impact is relatively limited.