Google Rolls Out "goto" Redirect Parameter to Combat AI Scraping
Google has confirmed the rollout of a new "goto" redirect parameter in its search results, routing users through an intermediate "google.com/goto" address instead of linking directly to target pages. This change is designed to prevent automated scraping and AI data harvesting by replacing client-side links with server-side redirects. This update significantly disrupts the web scraping and SEO monitoring industries by making bulk data collection from Google Search much more difficult. AI companies and scraping tools will face higher operational costs because they can no longer easily extract destination URLs directly from the search results page. According to SEO monitoring platform Nozzle, Google has deployed this change widely across residential IP proxy networks, achieving nearly 100% coverage. Scrapers must now actively follow each redirect link to resolve the final destination, which dramatically increases the resource overhead and cost for large-scale data harvesting.
## BACKGROUND
Web scrapers often use residential proxies, which route traffic through standard home internet connections, to bypass Google's bot detection systems. Previously, scrapers could easily extract destination URLs directly from the HTML of Google's search results, but server-side redirects force the client to make an active request to resolve the final destination.