On 26 August 2026, Google confirmed something that had been spreading quietly through search results since late June. The links on its results pages no longer point straight at your website. They point at Google first.
The pattern looks like google.com/goto?url= followed by an encoded version of the destination. Click a result, and you now go through a switchboard instead of dialling direct. For most Canadian business owners this changes nothing they can see. For a few things sitting behind the scenes, it changes quite a lot, and the honest answer on the rest is that nobody has measured it yet.
What actually changed
The redirect was first publicly spotted on 23 June 2026 by Alex Greenland, and first reported by Barry Schwartz on 8 July (sourced from Search Engine Roundtable). At that point it was rare enough that Schwartz could not reproduce it himself.
By 26 August it was confirmed and effectively everywhere. Derek Perkins of Nozzle reported seeing "nearly a 100% rollout across several residential ip providers" (sourced from Search Engine Land). It affects organic listings and paid ads, and it has been seen in other search features too.
Google's confirmation was one sentence, and it is worth reading closely: "We have a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse, and we regularly take steps to protect our services and users." That is the whole statement. There is no Search Central blog post, no documentation, no timeline, and no geographic breakdown. Canadian searchers appear to be seeing it, but Google has not published a country list, so I am not going to claim one.
What this breaks, and it is probably not your website
The clearest impact is on third-party rank tracking. A tracker used to read the destination straight off the results page. Now it has to follow a redirect to find out where each link goes, because the encoded parameter cannot be decoded on its own.
PPC Land reports that resolving every link in a single five-page ranking report takes 500 to 1,000 extra requests (sourced from PPC Land). DemandSphere published the failure modes it saw before it adapted, including destination URLs that all resolved to google.com and domain matching that stopped recognizing a client's own pages, which quietly corrupts share of voice and competitor attribution (sourced from DemandSphere). DemandSphere says its organic ranking data is unaffected now that countermeasures are in place, and DataForSEO reports resolving 99.99% of organic result URLs (sourced from DataForSEO).
So if a rank report looked strange in the last two weeks of August, this is the most likely explanation, and the fix is your vendor's job rather than yours.
What nobody has established yet
This is where most of the coverage gets ahead of the evidence, so here is the state of it honestly.
Analytics and referrer data. Whether the redirect changes what your server and your analytics see as the referrer is not established by any source I could find. Nobody has published a firsthand test.
Search Console. Search Engine Land's write-up says you "have to assume" Search Console is unaffected. That is a journalist's assumption stated as one, not a Google confirmation.
Rankings and click-through rate. No source claims an effect in either direction.
Anyone telling you your attribution has definitely broken is guessing. Anyone telling you it definitely has not is also guessing. The useful position is to measure now, so that if something did shift you can prove it rather than argue about it.
What to actually do this week
Fifteen minutes, once, and you have a baseline. You cannot detect a change you never wrote down.
Open Google Analytics and record your Google organic sessions for the last 30 days, next to the 30 days before that. Write the two numbers somewhere you will find them again.
Do the same in Search Console for clicks and impressions, and note how much of your traffic Search Console attributes to Google versus what your analytics attributes to "direct".
Email whoever supplies your rank tracking and ask one question: what have you done about the google.com/goto redirect. A good vendor already has an answer published.
Put a reminder in your calendar for 30 days out to compare the same four numbers. That comparison is the entire experiment.
If you already run a monthly check on your own visibility, this slots straight into it. If you do not, the 15-minute monthly SEO routine is where I would start, because the habit matters more than the tool.
The pattern worth noticing
Set this next to AI Overviews, and a direction shows up. Google keeps adding layers between a search and your website, and each layer takes a little measurement with it. None of these changes is a crisis on its own. Together they mean the businesses that can still answer "where did that customer come from" are the ones who wrote the numbers down before the layer arrived. Writing them down every month is part of the SEO and content work, if you would rather it were not your job to remember.
So: do you know what your search traffic looked like last month, or only what it looks like today?