[German]Brief information on a topic that may no longer have much relevance. Google is shutting down its link shortener service goo.gl on August 25, 2025. Anyone who has worked with the link shortener will see their links break from this date and an error 404 will be returned. This end was actually foreseeable, as new short links could no longer be set up since 2019. After all, it took over six years for Google to pull the plug.
What is goo.gl?
goo.gl was a so-called link shortening service (link shortener). On the goo.gl site, you could enter a long link in a form and receive a short link of the type goo.gl/xxxxx.
The characters xxxx are a placeholder for a value calculated by Google Link Shortener. If someone called up this shortened link, the Google service resolved it to the long URL with the target address and the user was shown the original page of the original link in the browser. This service had been around since 2009, almost as long as this blog.
The service has been discontinued since 2019
The end of goo.gl was actually foreseeable, as Google had already discontinued the service for new entries years ago. The screenshot above already shows a warning that the use of link shortening for the general public would end on March 30, 2018.
From April 13, 2018, only existing users could still use the service to shorten links. From March 30, 2019, the link shortening feature was then switched off. I reported on this in the German blog post Google Link-Verkürzer goo.gl wird eingestellt (Google link shortener goo.gl is being discontinued). Existing links continued to work after the shutdown date as goo.gl was still running.
From August 25, 2025, short links are broken
Google had already announced the end of the service in July 2024 – The Verge has compiled some information on the shutdown in this article. More than 99% of the short links generated by goo.gl were no longer active at that time. So now the time has come – from August 25, 2025, the goo.gl short URLs will only return an Error 404 when called.
