For years, URL shorteners have been an easy way to share lengthy links on the internet. Rather than typing out a web address that is both ugly and seemingly endless, you can put it through a shortener to produce a neat, tidy, and tiny URL. There have been many different services to accomplish this over the years, from TinyURL, to Bitly, and to Short.io. But one legacy link shortener that has been out of commission for some time was developed by none other than Google itself. Goo.gl launched in 2009, and had a decade-long run before Google shut the service down in 2019. While you haven't been able to rely on goo.gl for your new link shortening needs since then, existing shortened URLs still functioned normally. That was good news for both the websites had been linking out via goo.gl links for years, as well as the readers who consume that content. However, in July 2024, Google put all of us on notice, announcing plans to shut down all goo.gl links. The following month, the company started attaching a note to goo.gl URLs. When you clicked on one of those links, you'd see a warning that all goo.gl links would stop working after Aug. 25, 2025, provided Google detected no "recent activity" on that link. Google's reasoning for the change was simple: It had determined that over 99% of existing short links had no activity in between June 2024 and July 2024, indicating the time had come to retire the service altogether. That remained the official story for more than a year. Google put the onus on developers to change out their goo.gl links, or lose those links for good. However, it seems Google received enough negative feedback on the goo.gl deprecation decision that, as of Aug. 1 of this year, it added a new update to the top of its original announcement, confirming that not all goo.gl links will be deactivated. Just most of them.Which goo.gl links will be deprecated?According to Google, only the shortlinks that were deemed inactive in late 2024 will be deprecated after Aug. 25, 2025. That means any links that Google added a redirect notice to—that is, the "99%" that received the alert letting you know those links would be decommissioned—are still set to die later this month. All other goo.gl links have gotten a reprieve. If you run a website of any kind, this is bittersweet news. On the one hand, any goo.gl links that were active in late 2024 are safe. That could be huge for anyone who consistently relied on these shortlinks between 2009 and 2019. However, it also means that the Aug. 25 deadline is still on, though only for some links. You don't have to scrambles to replace every goo.gl link, but you do need to confirm which links have been targeted by Google for deprecation—which is a challenge in its own right.That work to shore up your web infrastructure will be appreciated by those of us who click those links in articles all across the web. Link rot is a very real problem on the internet, a place where we once thought everything we posted would live on forever. Hopefully, websites can tackle as many of these deprecated shortlinks as possible before the Aug. 25 deadline. In reality, though, I suspect many soon-to-be-dead links will not be fixed—whether because the hosts don't get to them in time, or the sites have been largely abandoned anyway.