URL shorteners are a good idea when it comes to sharing a longer address that you know will need to be typed manually. They are a bad idea for anything that a user might want to use over a longer period of time.
Case in point, in 2018 Google deprecated its URL shortener and in July announced that it will also be sunsetting currently shortened URLs in August of 2025.
In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time. This meant that we no longer accepted new URLs to shorten but that we would continue serving existing URLs.
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.As such, we will be turning off Google URL Shortener. Please read on below to understand more about how this may impact you.
Who is impacted?
Any developers using links built with the Google URL Shortener in the form https://goo.gl/* will be impacted, and these URLs will no longer return a response after August 25th, 2025. We recommend transitioning these links to another URL shortener provider.
It’s baffling that Google is as popular as it is as a citizen of the web when they seem to have no conception of respect for users or of the web itself. It’s also crazy that their advice is to just find a different URL shortener: NO! If you haven’t realized this yet, using a shortener breaks the web. Every time one of these shorteners goes under all of their collective use suddenly dies with it.
I guess people just need to learn you can’t trust Google. Don’t be evil… indeed.