Hovering over a Google result no longer tells you where it goes

Hover your mouse over a link in Google's search results and look at the bottom-left corner of your browser. If what appears is google.com/goto?url= followed by a wall of characters, you are looking at something new.

Google has been rolling out what it calls passthrough URLs. Rather than the link going straight to the site, it now goes to Google first, which bounces you onward. The real destination is in there, wrapped in Google's own encoding, but it does not resolve until you actually click. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable spotted the test in July and got confirmation in late August; measurements from Nozzle put it at close to a full rollout. Google's only public comment is that it has "a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse", which most people have read as an effort to stop AI firms and scrapers harvesting results in bulk.

Whatever the motive, there is a side effect, and Malwarebytes put its finger on it this week. Checking a link by hovering over it is one of the few free safety habits an ordinary person has, and on Google results it now tells you nothing. That bites hardest at the top of the page, where sponsored results sit and where fake support numbers and counterfeit shops have been buying their way in all year.

You are not left with nothing. Google still prints the claimed web address above each result, so read that rather than the blue headline, and check your address bar once the page has loaded instead of before. If something you clicked has already changed your homepage or your default search engine, Tendvane's "browser hijacked" repair wizard puts those settings back where you left them.