When a URL shortener shuts down

In July 2024 Google announced that goo.gl links would stop working. A year later it changed the plan: links still receiving traffic were preserved, and links with no recent activity stopped resolving on 25 August 2025.

That is a better outcome than the original announcement, and it is still the same lesson. A short link is a promise made by somebody else's infrastructure. The address printed on the poster belongs to the shortener, the redirect behind it is a decision the shortener makes on every request, and neither of those is under the control of whoever shared the link.

The useful response is not to avoid shorteners. It is to know, before a link goes anywhere permanent, which of them will keep resolving and why. Three questions cover most of it.

What does non-payment do to an existing link?

This is the first question because it is the most common failure and the least discussed. A shutdown is rare. A card expiring is not.

The answers in this market differ more than the marketing suggests. Some plans stop resolving existing links when a subscription lapses. Some keep resolving them but stop reporting on them. Some cap the number of links and count the cap against links already created rather than against new ones.

On uhm.co the answer is one rule: a billing state can block the creation of new links and can never stop an existing one from redirecting.

What a billing state does to a link

Existing linksNew links

Monthly allowance spentRedirectBlocked

Subscription lapsedRedirectBlocked

Moved to a smaller planRedirectBlocked

Subscription cancelledRedirectBlocked

Running out of the monthly allowance, moving to a smaller plan, cancelling, or letting a subscription lapse all land in the same column. The refusal happens at creation, which is the moment where a person is present and can react to it, rather than at a redirect, which happens when nobody is watching and the visitor is somebody else.

The scope of that promise is worth stating exactly, because a promise that quietly has exceptions is not one. It covers billing states. It does not cover abuse: a link whose destination is reported and reviewed can be taken down, and a suspended account stops resolving. Those are enforcement decisions, and being able to make them is the reason the shared domain stays usable for everyone else.

Is the redirect cacheable?

A shortener that answers with a permanent redirect hands the browser a decision it will never revisit. A browser that has seen a 301 for an address may go straight to the old destination the next time, without asking anyone. The link still exists, the service is still running, and the visitor still ends up in the wrong place.

That matters twice. It means an edited destination does not reach people who have already followed the link, and it means a link cannot be reliably retired. Anything printed is affected most, because a printed address outlives the campaign that created it.

uhm.co answers 302 with Cache-Control: no-store, so every visit asks again and an edit takes effect on the next request. The cost is one request per click, which is also what makes the click countable at all.

Who owns the domain?

This is the question the goo.gl timeline actually turns on. Nothing a customer could have done inside Google's shortener would have preserved a goo.gl address, because the address was never theirs.

A short link on a domain the sender owns is a different object. The provider still runs the redirect, but the name in front of the slug belongs to whoever registered it, and it can be pointed somewhere else. That is the part of a short link that survives a provider changing its mind, and it is the reason a custom domain is worth more than a nicer-looking link.

uhm.co supports that: a domain is verified with a TXT record, a certificate is issued automatically on the first request, and the domain stays with its owner regardless of what happens here. Which plans include it is on the pricing page.

What to do with a link that already exists

For links already in circulation on a shortener nobody controls, there is no clever fix. There is an audit, and it is worth doing before the question becomes urgent: newsletters and their archives, scheduled and evergreen ads, SMS templates, printed material still in the field, support macros, and QR codes on packaging. Anything printed cannot be edited, which is what makes the redirect behind it the only thing that can be.

The goo.gl reprieve preserved links that were still being used. That was a favour, not a property of the system, and it was announced thirteen months after the first notice. Designing around a favour is how a link becomes somebody else's decision.