Tracking woe? What Google’s goto URL redirect means for affiliates

If your SEO tools behaved strangely in August, it wasn't you. 

Since the first week of the month, Google has been rolling out a quiet change that it finally confirmed on 26 August: the links in search results no longer point to websites. They point to an opaque redirect hosted on google.com/goto. For a user, nothing changes. For everyone who measured Google from the outside, everything does.

Here is why affiliates are first in line and what we decided to do about it at MoveUp Media.

What has changed 

Until now, the destination URL of a result was readable in the page's code. A rank tracker loaded the SERP, read the ten links and knew who ranked where. 

Since August, every link is an encoded token that only Google can decode. To learn the destination, you have to follow the redirect, one link at a time. The lightweight requests that used to shortcut this are blocked.

The result, according to the tool vendors themselves, is that reading a five-page SERP now takes between 500 and 1,000 requests, whereas one was enough a year ago. And that cost stacks on top of September 2025, when Google removed the parameter that displayed a hundred results in one load. The bill was multiplied by ten back then. It is being multiplied again.

The effects showed immediately. Several large all-in-one tools suffered outages or multi-day data delays in August. Meanwhile, some raw-data API providers had seen the change coming during the summer test phase. 

DataForSEO, for example, claimed that they had a 99.99% resolution rate on organic results, with an acknowledged weak spot on AI Overviews, unresolved in 52% of cases as of 27 August, and announced full SERP resolution the following day. SerpApi and DemandSphere reported similar countermeasures. So the dividing line is not tools versus APIs. It separates those who own their collection infrastructure from those who buy their data from a third party and resell it inside an interface.

One calendar detail is worth noting. Google sued a search-results API provider in December 2025, arguing that scraping circumvented its protections. On 20 July, 2026, a federal court in California dismissed the core of the complaint: blocking a bot is not a copyright violation. Two weeks later, the technical lock was rolling out at scale. When the legal door closes, Google changes doors.

Why affiliates are first in line

No industry depends on rank tracking as much as ours. Hundreds of thousands of commercial keywords across dozens of markets, operator reports built on positions, deals negotiated on SERP screenshots, content teams steered by ranking curves.

All of it rested on data that cost almost nothing to produce and has just become a hundred to a thousand times more expensive to collect. The increase will land in our subscriptions or in the freshness and depth of what the tools show us. Probably both.

Three consequences you are about to feel

Discontinuity. Positions recorded before June during the summer test phase and after the August rollout are not comparable to each other. Part of the "volatility" everyone flagged in early August was not a Google movement. It was a measurement artifact. So before rewriting a strategy on the basis of an August curve, check that the curve still measures the same thing.

Freshness. Tools that refreshed everything daily will have to prioritise. The top 10 will stay daily for the keywords that matter. The rest will move to two, three or six days. For a bonus page whose ranking moves with every offer change, three days of lag is a week of decisions taken blind.

Depth. To cut costs, tools will track less deeply. Yet positions 30 to 100 are exactly where pages under construction live, the ones you push before they earn. Losing that visibility means losing the growth dashboard and keeping only the one for what already exists.

What we have done 

We did not wait for Google's confirmation to move, and I am sharing our choices because any affiliate can replicate them, whatever their size.

Search Console becomes the source of truth, not the complement. It is the only position data Google cannot shut off, because Google gives it to us itself. It has limits: two days of lag, sampling. But it measures our real traffic, not a reconstruction of the SERP seen through a proxy.

We recorded a baseline this week. The ratio between Search Console clicks and organic sessions in our analytics, site by site. If Google ever touches the referrer through its redirects, that ratio is what will alert us, not a third-party tool.

Rank tracking is refocused on money. We used to track keywords by volume. We now track first those that produce first-time depositors, market by market. Fewer keywords, more expensive to follow, but each one justifies its cost.

SERP data arrives raw, via API, in our own cockpits. We are moving out of all-in-one interfaces and plugging search-results APIs straight into our dashboards. 

Three reasons. The API-first players anticipated, the others endured. Unit cost is in a different league: a ten-result SERP is priced at around half a thousandth of a dollar in the standard queue, which puts daily top-20 tracking of 20,000 keywords at a few hundred dollars a month, whereas an enterprise subscription costs several times that for fewer markets. And raw data reconciles with Search Console, while a closed interface reconciles with nothing. Two caveats: those prices predate the redirect surcharge and will move, and you need two interchangeable providers behind an internal layer, because the legal fight between Google and API providers is not over.

Every number shows its age. Our internal cockpits now display, for every block, how old the data is. Six-day-old positions and yesterday's clicks do not read the same way. Mixing them silently was acceptable when everything was fresh. It no longer is.

The common thread is simple: we measure Google less and less, and our own business more and more.

The new currency of negotiation 

Many deals in our industry still rest on positions. "We rank number one for that query" is still a sales argument. If that position becomes expensive for you to verify, it becomes just as expensive for the operator across the table. What are you going to negotiate on in 2027?

The honest answer: on what you own. Your conversions, your audiences, your subscribers, your first-party data. A position is a snapshot of a system that belongs to someone else. A Telegram channel or a newsletter is an asset that belongs to you.

Google did not close the door on SEO. Sites still rank, traffic still arrives, the referrer is still there. Google closed the door on those who observed the SERP from the outside cheaply to churn out market data.

Affiliates who built their steering on that observation will pay more to see less. Those who steer on their own data will find the change almost painless. The next hearing in the lawsuit against scrapers is set for 29 September. Whatever the outcome, the direction is set. Better to prepare now.