Google will soon make its own contribution to the problem of link rot by shutting down the Google URL Shortener service in 2025.
The Google URL Shortener was launched in 2009 as an attempt to make lengthy links manageable by feeding them into Google’s shortener, which spat out shorter ones in the form of https://goog.gl/*. Nine years later, Google decided to pull the service and direct users to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) instead.
At the time, Google said, “All existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.”
However, as of August 25, 2025, any links built with the Google URL shortener in the form of https://goog.gl/* won’t return a response.
It’ll be a slow death for the service. From August 23, 2024, goo.gl links will show an interstitial page for a percentage of users warning that the link’s days are numbered. As the shutdown date nears, that percentage will increase.
Once shutdown happens, the links will simply return a 404 response.
The interstitial links could be a headache in their own right since there is every chance they could interfere with a redirect flow. And this is why Google’s advising engineers to transition those goog.gl links as quickly as possible.
But transition them to where? Google’s earlier advice to move to FDL might have sounded good in 2018, but the company has since deprecated the functionality, and on August 25, 2025, the service will stop working, alongside the Google URL Shortener.
The challenge facing engineers is tracking down all the places where an affected link might be used; Link Rot – where links that might have once worked but now return a 404 – has become an increasing problem as the World Wide Web has matured. Decisions such as Google’s will only serve to make the problem worse. ®