Google is killing millions of old links. How to check yours.

Google may have partially walked back a plan to deprecate all shortened goo.gl links, but millions of links that rely on the link shortener will still break before the end of August.

Links created with Google's URL shortener that are still actively being used will be "preserved," according to an Aug. 1 update to its original 2024 announcement.

Initially, Google decided turn off its URL shortener tool and kill all goo.gl links, redirecting them to a page notifying the user that the links would become inactive after Aug. 25, 2025 before allowing users to proceed to the originally linked page.

The way links are shared online has changed since the link shortener heyday in the early and mid 2000s. Shorteners like goo.gl offered a cleaner, more user-friendly way to share long URLs — especially when social media sites like Twitter, now X, had shorter character limits. Plus there are lots of other services like Bit.ly and Ow.ly that became more popular than Google's.

"Over time, these existing URLs saw less and less traffic as the years went on - in fact more than 99% of them had no activity in the last month," said Google's announcement last July.

But it turns out, some of these links were still actively being used.

"We understand these links are embedded in countless documents, videos, posts and more, and we appreciate the input received," said the latest update. So those links will still be alive after the Aug. 25 cutoff date.

How to check if your links are still active

There's a simple test to see if your link still works after the cutoff date. To check if the link is still active, plug it into your browser. If the page you expect to see appears right away instead of redirecting to the Google message warning about the change first, it will continue to work, said the update.