The long-running clock on Google’s URL shortener goo.gl finally has a death date: August 25, 2025. That’s when links that were shortened using the defunct service will no longer be accessible, according to a blog post from the company this week.
It’s not as if Google hasn’t given some warning: it announced way back in 2018 that it was phasing out the service, which allowed users to enter a long web address and shorten it to something much more compact. Goo.gl was one of several popular URL shorteners including Bitly and TinyURL that rose alongside the explosion of social media when web sharers needed to conserve characters on services such as Twitter.
At the time, Google said it was no longer going to accept new URLs to shorten, but it continued to support the use of existing goo.gl links. “Today, the time has come to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener,” Google said in its blog post.
But “today” is a bit of a stretch, since the URLs will continue to work until next year. Starting in August of this year, an interstitial warning page will appear before users are taken to the target URL. On August 25 of 2025, they won’t work at all and will return a 404 error message.
If you’re someone who still has content on the web using the link shortener, you’ve got a year to update those links to avoid sending people to a dead end.
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