Google now routes search clicks through a redirect. Check your Direct traffic.

On 26 August 2026 Barry Schwartz reported that Google had confirmed it was rolling out google.com/goto passthrough URLs on search results. Alex Greenland had spotted the rewritten links on 23 June.

Every organic click now takes a hop through Google before it reaches your page.

Nobody at Google framed this as an analytics change. It is going to show up as one anyway, and if you report to a client monthly you want to have said so before they notice.

1. What the change is

A search result used to link to your URL. Now it links to a google.com/goto URL with your destination encoded as a parameter, and a server-side redirect forwards the browser.

Derek Perkins of the rank tracking company Nozzle told Search Engine Roundtable he was seeing it at nearly a 100 percent rollout across several residential IP providers.

The stated reason is anti-scraping. A Google spokesperson said the company has a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse.

That reason is credible and it is not the whole effect.

2. The complication: your traffic did not move, your labels did

Here is what we walked into on a client account this month.

Direct sessions up. Google organic down by a similar amount. Conversions flat, revenue flat, Search Console clicks flat.

The first instinct was that something broke in the tracking setup. Nothing had. A redirect hop can drop the referrer depending on the browser and the referrer policy in force, and a session arriving with no referrer gets filed as Direct.

So the business was fine and the report said it was not. We spent most of a day proving a decline that had not happened.

3. How to check whether it hit you

Pull Direct and Google organic sessions by week, going back to the start of August 2026.

Look for the shape: Direct rising and Google organic falling by roughly the same amount, starting late August, with total sessions roughly flat.

Then cross-check against Search Console clicks for the same weeks. Search Console does not depend on the referrer, so it is your control. If Search Console clicks held steady while your analytics says organic fell, the traffic is there and the label moved.

If Search Console clicks fell too, you have a real decline and this is not your explanation.

4. What to do about it in reporting

Annotate the date in your analytics platform. Late August 2026, google.com/goto rollout, referrer attribution affected.

Then change the headline metric for organic performance to Search Console clicks, and keep analytics sessions as the secondary. Search Console is the more reliable source for organic volume now, and it always was for impressions.

Do not try to reconstruct the lost attribution with a clever filter. You are guessing at which Direct sessions were organic, and a guess in a client report is worse than a gap with a note on it.

5. What it does to rank tracking

This one is less about you and more about your tools.

The change makes scraping search results harder, and rank tracking is scraping search results. Expect your rank tracker's coverage or refresh rate to wobble while vendors adapt.

Treat a sudden change in tracked positions during this period as suspect until you can confirm it in Search Console's average position. Two sources, one conclusion, same as always.

6. The wider pattern worth noticing

Google is closing the observability of its own results at the same time as more of the answer moves into surfaces you cannot query.

The AI Overview gives you impressions and no click data. The goto redirect makes the click harder to attribute. The Generative AI report in Search Console shows impressions only.

Each individual change is defensible. The direction of all of them together is that measuring your own search performance increasingly depends on Google's first-party reporting rather than on anything you can observe independently.

We flagged the same drift in the booking that came from ChatGPT and never showed up in your analytics. This is the Google-side version of it.

7. What we changed in our own reporting

Search Console clicks became the primary organic number on every NovaTechRay report from September.

Analytics sessions stayed, labelled as attribution-affected, with the annotation visible on the chart rather than in a footnote.

And we added one line to the method page: where a number depends on the referrer, say so. We should have had that line before this happened, and we did not.

The short version

• Check Direct against Google organic from late August 2026, with total sessions as the sanity check.
• Use Search Console clicks as your control, because it does not depend on the referrer.
• Annotate the rollout date in your analytics platform now, before the next monthly report.
• Make Search Console clicks the primary organic metric and demote sessions to secondary.
• Do not rebuild the missing attribution with filters and call it data.
• Treat rank tracker movement during the rollout as unconfirmed until Search Console agrees.

Reporting that says what it cannot see is the version we sell at novatechray.com.