Confirmed
Google confirms it is rolling out google.com/goto passthrough redirects
Google confirmed to Search Engine Roundtable that it is rolling out google.com/goto passthrough redirect URLs across Search results, a test that began in July 2026. Third-party monitoring from Nozzle puts the rollout near 100% across residential IP ranges. The redirect URLs cannot be decoded client-side, forcing any tool reading result links to follow a server-side hop instead of linking straight to the destination page.
In plain termsInstead of a search result linking straight to a website, clicking one now first bounces through a Google-owned link that hides the real URL until your browser follows it.
Why it mattersRank trackers, citation-mining tools, and any scraper reading SERP result URLs now need a redirect-follow step, or their link data breaks silently.
Our takeI argued in Google's sign-in wall test that Google reaches for technical enforcement once a legal claim fails, weeks after its DMCA loss to SerpApi. The goto redirect fits the same pattern with a wider reach: it does not just gate deep pagination, it touches every result link, and Nozzle's near-100% figure suggests this one is already live rather than a limited experiment.
Deep dive: Google's goto Redirect Breaks URL Precision While Rank Tracking Survives
Observed
Bing tests renaming its Copilot Search answer box to AI Overviews
Microsoft is testing a label swap on Bing's AI answer box, replacing 'Copilot Search' with 'AI Overviews,' the same term Google uses for its own AI answer feature. The Copilot logo still appears inside the box. First spotted by Sachin Patel on X, then confirmed by Search Engine Roundtable's own screenshots showing the test running alongside the unchanged 'Copilot Search' label served outside it.
In plain termsBing is testing calling its AI-written answer box 'AI Overviews,' the exact name Google already uses for its own version, even though the two boxes come from different companies and different AI systems.
Why it mattersNaming an AI answer box after a competitor's term risks conflating two different platforms' answer surfaces for anyone tracking AI visibility by engine.
Our takeA shared label makes AI Overviews function like a category name rather than a Google product name, and that ambiguity cuts both ways. It could normalize the format faster across search engines, or it could make attribution harder for anyone trying to say which platform's answer actually drove a citation.
Observed
SEJ documents ChatGPT targeting a named subreddit in its search queries
Search Engine Journal documented ChatGPT crafting a site-restricted query naming a specific subreddit, r/whatnotapp, with a roughly 10-year time window, then citing six of eight sources from that community out of 48 Reddit threads among 71 total results. A control query on AI live-chat software four days earlier pulled 84 Reddit threads into its results but cited none of them, showing the targeting is query-dependent rather than a blanket Reddit policy.
In plain termsFor some questions ChatGPT does not just search Reddit broadly, it writes a search command that targets one specific subreddit by name, the way you might search inside a single forum instead of the whole site.
Why it mattersCitation behavior toward a domain like Reddit can flip within the same session depending on how specific the query is, which complicates any single Reddit citation-rate benchmark.
Our takeI documented in Does AI prefer Reddit? that OpenAI rejects 99.39% of the Reddit pages it retrieves overall, the single most-rejected domain in Dejan's citation-mining dataset. This one-query anecdote, six of eight citations pulled from a single subreddit, reads as a query-level outlier sitting on top of that system-level rejection habit, not evidence ChatGPT is warming to Reddit broadly.