Already in 2009, Google launched its address shortening service, better known by its URLk, goo.gl.an address which is quite easy to remember and which for several years became a very commonly used resource to reduce large addresses, in many cases hugely parameterized, to others that were much shorter, readable, and therefore much more optimal for sharing more ways, but mainly on Twitter, which in its early days did not automatically shorten them and which had an initial limit of 140 characters per message.

However, In 2018, Google announced that the service would no longer be available. The advent of other more advanced tools and the evolution of users’ use of the Internet during those nine years meant that goo.gl was no longer useful for the search engine company. And as we already know very well, those of us at Mountain View cringe when it comes to discontinuing products or services that, for whatever reason, we feel no longer make sense to maintain.

Now, although it was no longer possible to create new shortlinks using this tool from that point on, Google kept all the ones created up to that time functional, and that some sources claim to be over 3.5 billion. So all these shortened links are still operating today, more than six years after the end of the service, more than an extended period, but it has been pointing to logical expiration for some time.

Well, this point has been confirmed because, as we can read on their developer support site, links created with goo.gl will stop working on August 25, 2025, in just over a year. So Google leaves more than a reasonable amount of time for any links shortened by this tool that are still in use today (and I know they exist) to be updated by the people responsible on websites, apps, etc.

Even before that, starting on August 23, 2024, by clicking on any of these links The message you can see above the top paragraph will start to appear., stating that the link will stop working soon. However, users will be able to acknowledge the message and access the full link, as well as indicate that they do not wish to see this warning again. As the months go by, this message will appear in more links on goo.gl, although it’s unclear if it will finally be visible to everyone.