tl;dr: Google Search now wraps organic result links in `google.com/goto?url=...` using an opaque, Google-specific encoding rather than the readable `google.com/url?q=` format, forcing scrapers to make an additional request to Google (reading the Location header) just to resolve each destination URL. The change, rolling out broadly to logged-out and private sessions as of late August 2026, raises the cost of bulk SERP harvesting and follows other anti-scraping moves like killing `&num=100` and tightening SearchGuard.