tl;dr: Google Search now wraps organic result links in `google.com/goto?url=...` with an opaque, non-decodable blob instead of the previous plaintext `google.com/url?q=` format, forcing scrapers to make an extra request to Google (reading the `Location` header) just to resolve each destination URL. The change, rolled out broadly to logged-out and private sessions by late August 2026, is part of Google's escalating anti-scraping efforts alongside removing `&num=100` and tightening BotGuard/SearchGuard.