- Earlier this year, Google implemented automatic link shortening for stories shared through Discover.
- If you’d rather keep the full URL intact, it looks like Google is developing an option to disable the shorteners.
- Right now we’re able to activate an early preview of the toggle, but it’s not yet operational.
Google is absolutely no stranger when it comes to controversies, but they don’t have to all be big “federal antitrust case” scale for us to take notice of them. Sometimes it’s the smallest moves that end up generating a little pushback, and earlier this year we raised an eyebrow to a questionable change Discover was implementing, replacing full URLs with shortened URLs for sharing. If you didn’t love the idea of Google tracking those links, or people just not being able to easily tell what they were clicking, we might have some good news for you.