Google Search’s cached links used to be a handy way to access a website that was down or had revisions, and SEO professionals depended on them to track competitors' updates. But Google is now shutting down this tool. Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sulivan, confirmed that cached links are now part ofGoogle’s retired features and services.
Rumor had it for a while, with Search Engine Roundtable’sBarry Schwartzreporting last month that Google had started removing cached links entirely. The vanishing act might have kicked off late last year when cached links mysteriouslydisappearedfrom theAbout this resultpanel found in the three-button menu beside a search result.
In response to Schwartz’s post on X (formerly Twitter), Sullivan officially said the feature got the boot. According to him, this longstanding feature was initially designed to help people access web pages when internet connections were unreliable. In a nutshell, Google’s cache function was the ancient remedy for one of the web’s earliest headaches.
Essentially a backup of the web
Loads of users found this feature pretty handy. Journalists, for instance, used cached links to track what a company had tweaked or deleted on its website. Others have also figured out that the cache is a secret weapon against paywalls or a budget-friendly VPN to sneak into websites blocked in certain regions.
Getting to a page’s cache used to be a breeze, with aCachedbutton appearing at the bottom of theAbout this resultbox in search results. If you’re one of those savvy users, you could throw in a “cache:” before a URL in the search bar to teleport straight into Google’s cached version. But even that trick is getting the boot, according to Sullivan.
There’s another fix, but it seems to be hanging by a thread. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine saves old versions of websites, but it’s always striving to keep the lights on. Sullivan threw out the idea of teaming up with the Internet Archive, imagining a world where the cached link turns into a link to the Wayback Machine’s snapshot of a webpage. But that’s just a wild thought for now.
It’s pretty easy to figure out that Google wasn’t rolling in dough from users hitting up its search engine for cached results. While Google’s web crawler was out there hunting the web for fresh stuff, it was also hoarding copies of everything it stumbled upon. That meant Google ended up with what must have been a crazy amount of data, essentially a backup of the whole internet. But now,in the age of pinching pennies, clearing out some data cache and freeing up resources seems to be the tech giant’s logical option.
Still, having easy access to it was a little gift for searchers. Whenever controversies hit the fan—like content gone wild with major errors or proof of deleted social media posts—the cached feature was a reliable safety net.
