News Goodbye to Goo.gl, another service for Google's 'elephant graveyard'

Published on

July 28, 2025

by

Jose Montes

Google will permanently remove Goo.gl in less than a month, a development that developers and webmasters will need to take into account. The URL shortening service ( Google URL Shortener ) will thus join the long list of services that Google has discontinued throughout its history.

URL shorteners have become more relevant than ever, and so—although it was announced long ago—Goo.gl's exit from the market may be surprising. With platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and others generating complex, multi-parameter URLs, condensed links are essential for efficiently sharing content through messaging apps, custom websites, or QR codes .

Goodbye to Goo.gl

It had been announced for some time. Google stopped accepting new users in 2018 and discontinued the service a year later, after a decade of using this URL shortener. The company urged developers and web administrators to migrate to its new Firebase Dynamic Links service . However, FDL also ended up becoming obsolete .

The company argued that more than 99% of the shortened links didn't generate any traffic, which it attributed to a shift in how people accessed the internet. Google encouraged users to adopt what it called "new and innovative" ways of browsing the web, including progressive web app- based experiences .

Still, Google continued to resolve existing goo.gl links to their original destinations. But all things must come to an end, and all URLs using the "goo.gl" domain will stop working completely on August 25, 2025 , displaying a standard HTTP 404 error.

Interestingly, alternatives like TinyURL , perhaps the most widely used service, continue to shorten millions of links daily and show no signs of leaving the market anytime soon.

The demise of Goo.gl is a stark reminder of Google's unpredictable product strategy . The company has a long history of launching services, encouraging users to adopt them, and then quietly shutting them down just a few years later.

This long list includes projects of all kinds, both consumer and professional, such as the connected glasses Google Glass, the social network Google+, the promising online gaming service Stadia, and the email app Inbox. In less than a month, Goo.gl will join the industry's largest elephant graveyard.

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