Google confirmed on August 26, 2026 that the links in its search results now run through a redirect instead of pointing straight at the destination site. The change is quiet, it is already close to fully deployed, and the first thing it breaks is rank tracking. If you pay for a tool that reports where you sit for your keywords, that data just became far more expensive to collect, and in some cases thinner.
Two Google Ads changes landed alongside it. Both are more immediately useful to a small business than the redirect is, and neither got much attention. Here is what actually happened, and what is worth doing about it.
The Link Redirect Is Live, and Rank Tracking Feels It First
The search result links that every rank tracking tool depends on now route through a google.com/goto address with the destination encoded inside, rather than linking directly to the site. A Google spokesperson confirmed the deployment to Search Engine Land, saying the company has “a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse, and we regularly take steps to protect our services and users.”
The rollout was not sudden, and it is worth being precise about that. Public sightings go back to late June, and the pattern was documented by SEO consultants through early July. What changed is scale. Derek Perkins of the rank tracking firm Nozzle reported the redirect at near 100 percent across several residential IP providers, which is the point where it stops being a test and starts being how Google Search works.
The target is scraping, not you. Third party rank tracking tools read Google’s results page to tell you where you rank, and AI engines read it to ground their answers. Encoding every destination behind a redirect makes that read enormously more expensive. Perkins measured that resolving all the links for a single five page ranking check now takes between 500 and 1,000 requests, where it used to take one.
The timing is not accidental either. In July a federal court dismissed Google’s copyright claims against the scraping provider SerpApi, finding that bypassing anti-scraping controls to reach uncopyrighted search results is not circumvention under that law. When the legal lever fails, the technical lever is what is left, and this is the technical lever.
What This Means for Your Rank Tracking Reports
Nothing disappears overnight. Rank tracking providers can still follow the redirects, they just have to spend hundreds of times more requests doing it. That expense lands somewhere, and it is not the kind a rank tracking vendor absorbs quietly. Expect it to surface as slower refresh cycles, fewer tracked keywords on the same plan, shallower result depth, or all three at once.
The advice for a small business is unglamorous. Stop treating a rank tracking dashboard as your primary measure of SEO health and start treating it as a secondary signal. If your rank tracking numbers wobble over the next few weeks, find out whether your tool changed how it collects before you conclude that your site moved. Attribution mistakes like that are how businesses end up rewriting pages that were never the problem.
What the Redirect Does Not Touch
Google Search Console is unaffected. It reports impressions, clicks and average position from Google’s own data rather than by reading the results page, which makes it the one ranking source this change cannot degrade. If you have been meaning to use Search Console properly instead of a rank tracking tool you only half trust, this is the week to switch your reporting habit.
Searchers are not affected. The destination still appears under the snippet title and the redirect resolves instantly, so visitors notice nothing. Publishers see no meaningful change in how traffic arrives either. Pair Search Console with the keyword research process you already run and you have a picture that does not depend on anyone scraping anything.
Google’s Demand Gen Drop Adds Messaging Ads and Opens AI Video to Everyone
A day later Google published its August Demand Gen Drop, and the headline item for a smaller advertiser is that Multimodal Video Creation in Asset Studio is now generally available. In Google’s own words, advertisers “can now go from storyboarding to creating horizontal and vertical assets in one workflow.” We covered the free video generation tool when it first went live. This is the point where it stops being a rollout and becomes standard equipment.
The genuinely new piece is messaging. Google says it is “testing new ways for viewers to start conversations with brands on messaging apps directly from Demand Gen ads on YouTube.” For a service business that closes work in conversation rather than through a form, that is a much shorter path than sending someone to a landing page and hoping they fill it in. It is a test, not a launch, so do not build a quarter around it.
Travel advertisers get the third piece: Demand Gen ads that surface local activities, events and real-time offers, plus hotel ads personalized to specific audiences. Google also states that its second half 2025 Demand Gen improvements are driving a 30 percent average increase in conversions or conversion value. That figure is Google’s own, measured by Google, and it belongs in the marketing claim column rather than the evidence column.
Google Ads Will Now Show You When AI Rewrote Your Product Titles
If you run Shopping ads, Google has been rewriting your product titles whenever its systems predict a generated title will outperform yours. A new Product titles report inside Google Ads finally makes that visible, showing the AI generated title next to your original along with impressions, product clicks, click-through rate and the usual spend metrics.
This is not new behavior, only new visibility, and that distinction matters. Google’s own Merchant Center documentation already describes dynamically customizing titles using “key product attributes using content from your landing page, images, and other signals.” The same documentation states that “you may choose to opt out of Product Data Customization with your Shopping ads” by contacting your account manager or support team, with requests typically processed in three to five business days.
Two things follow. Look at the report before you opt out, because a rewritten title that beats yours is genuine information about how people search for what you sell. And if you generate product titles with AI yourself, Google requires them in the structured title attribute rather than the standard title field, with the digital source type set to trained algorithmic media. Filing generated titles under the wrong attribute is a feed compliance problem waiting to happen.
Three Things Worth Doing This Week
- Open Google Search Console and set a baseline for your top 20 queries. It is the ranking source the redirect cannot degrade, and it belongs at the centre of your reporting rather than at the edge of it.
- Ask your rank tracking vendor, in writing, whether their collection method has changed and whether your plan limits are moving. Any shift in your rank tracking numbers over the next month should be explained before it is acted on.
- If you sell through Google Shopping, pull the Product titles report and compare the generated titles against your own before deciding whether to opt out.
None of this is an emergency. But the direction is consistent. Google is steadily closing off the data that third parties collect and sell back to you, and the businesses that come out ahead will be the ones already reading their own numbers. Rank tracking is quietly becoming a comfort metric. Your Search Console data, your conversion tracking and your actual booked work are the measures worth building on.
Rank Tracking and Google Ads Questions, Answered
Will the Google link redirect change my actual rankings?
No. The redirect changes how result links are written into the page, not how Google orders them. Your position is unchanged. What changes is how easily a third party rank tracking tool can read that position, which makes this a measurement problem rather than a ranking problem.
Should I cancel my rank tracking tool over this?
Not yet. Providers can still follow the redirects, just at far greater expense. Wait and see whether your plan limits, refresh frequency or result depth change. Treat rank tracking as a secondary signal and let Google Search Console carry your primary reporting in the meantime.
Is Google Search Console affected by the redirect?
No. Search Console reports position data from Google’s own systems rather than by reading the results page, so the redirect does not touch it. That makes it the most reliable free ranking source a small business has, and the natural fallback while tracking tools adjust.
Can I stop Google from rewriting my Shopping product titles?
Yes. Google’s Merchant Center documentation says you may opt out of Product Data Customization for Shopping ad titles by contacting your account manager or support team, with requests typically processed in three to five business days. Review the new Product titles report first.
Are the Demand Gen messaging ads available to everyone now?
No. Google describes messaging as something it is testing, not a general release, so it is not worth building a campaign plan around yet. Multimodal Video Creation in Asset Studio is the piece that became generally available to all advertisers in the same announcement.
Stay Ahead of Search and Ads Changes
Changes like these rarely announce themselves inside your account. If you would rather have someone watching the search landscape than discover a shift in a rank tracking report three months late, our SEO and analytics work is built around exactly that. If your rankings or ad performance have already moved and you cannot tell why, get in touch and we will look at it with you. To catch updates like this as they land, subscribe to the Demur Design newsletter in the footer below.
This recap is researched and drafted with AI, then reviewed, fact-checked, and published by Demur Design.
Sources
- Search Engine Land, “Google confirms deploying goto URL redirects to search results links” (August 26, 2026, carrying Google’s own spokesperson statement)
- PPC Land, “Google forces rank trackers into 500 to 1,000 requests per query” (with Nozzle’s own rollout and request-volume measurements)
- Search Engine Roundtable, “Google Search Rolling Out google.com/goto Tracking Parameters”
- Google Ads & Commerce Blog, “Reach your audience in new ways with August’s Demand Gen Drop” (Google’s own announcement, August 27, 2026)
- Search Engine Land, “Google expands Demand Gen with messaging ads, travel tools and AI video creation”
- MediaPost, “Google Expands Demand Gen Ads With Messaging, AI Video Creation”
- Search Engine Land, “Google Ads adds reporting for AI-generated product titles”
- Google Merchant Center Help, “Title and structured title” (Google’s own documentation on Product Data Customization and the opt-out path)
