Does Google's new goto redirect break attribution? We tested it

Last week Google changed the way its search results link out to websites.

Previously, a link in Google's search results pointed straight at the page it was sending you to. So if you clicked one of the blue links in a Google search results page, you were taken directly to the website in question.

That's no longer the case. Google now points those links at google.com/goto?url= (with the real destination encoded inside). So now when you click a link in the search results, you are sent to a page on Google's server first, and Google then redirects you to the actual page.

The purpose of this is to protect their results pages from scraping. Previously, rank tracking tools and AI engines would just do a search, look at the HTML of the search results page and be able to see which pages are ranking (because the links to the pages were right there in the HTML). Now though, they need to actually click and follow each link, which makes it significantly more difficult and expensive to do (and I guess Google's hope would be that they don't do it).

But it raised an obvious question for anyone who cares about attribution. If a click now passes through Google's servers instead of going straight to your website, does your site still get told the visit came from Google?

We ran some tests to find out.

When someone clicks a link from one website to another, the browser tells the destination website where the visitor came from. This is called the referrer, and it's a small piece of information passed along by the browser with each visitor.

It's the foundation of how traffic source reporting works. Tools like Attributer and Google Analytics read the referrer, see it came from google.com, and categorize the visit as Organic Search. If there's no referrer at all, there's nothing to go on, and the visit gets filed as Direct.

The worry was that inserting a redirect into the middle of that journey would break the chain. The visitor would technically be arriving from Google's redirect service rather than from a search results page, and it wasn't obvious what the browser would report (or if it would report anything at all).

We ran searches on Google, clicked through to the destination sites from the organic results, and then checked two things on arrival: the referrer the browser actually sent, and how Attributer categorized leads once they filled out a form.

We repeated this across 10 combinations of device and browser, covering the platforms that make up the overwhelming majority of real traffic.

The raw results of our tests are below:

Across every combination we tested, the referrer arrived intact and Attributer categorized the visit as Organic Search. We couldn't produce a single case where the redirect caused a visit to be misfiled as Direct.

The result makes sense once you look at how Google has been handling referrers for years.

Google sets a rule on its search pages called a referrer policy, and it's set to "origin". That tells the browser to pass along only the domain the visitor came from, and never the specific page. So your site receives https://www.google.com/ rather than the full search URL.

This is not new, and you've been living with it for over a decade. It's the reason you can't see which keyword someone searched before they landed on your site, and why Google Analytics has always shown organic search keywords as "not provided".

The important part is that this policy applies to the whole of google.com, and the new redirect lives on google.com too. Both the search results page and the redirect hop sit on the same domain. So regardless of this change, when a visitor arrives on your website, the referrer is google.com.

Nothing, which is the good news. You don't need to change any settings, add any tracking, or adjust how you read your reports.

If you use Attributer, your leads will keep being attributed to Organic Search exactly as before, and the channel, source and landing page data captured with each lead is unaffected.

If you use Google Analytics, your organic search sessions will keep being categorized correctly, and you shouldn't see any unexplained shift from organic into direct.

It's still worth a glance at your organic versus direct split over the coming weeks, simply because it costs nothing to check. But based on our testing, there's nothing here to fix.

The part of the industry that genuinely is affected is rank tracking. Tools that report on where you rank now have to click each link and follow each redirect (rather than just reading the HTML of the search results page). This is slower and considerably more expensive to run at scale, so you may see your rank tracking get more expensive, or perhaps less frequent, or more limited in some other way over the coming months.

Google's move to route search clicks through google.com/goto was built to make life harder for scrapers, and I'd very much imagine it will.

The concern that it would also break attribution turned out to be unfounded. Across all 10 device and browser combinations we tested, the referrer came through every time, which means tools like Attributer and Google Analytics can still correctly categorize these visits and leads as Organic Search.