Google Search ‘cached’ link is officially dead

A long-time feature of Google Search is officially going away, as cached webpages will no longer be available in search results.

Over the past few months, you may have noticed in Google Search that the “cached” link has been appearing less often. As it turns out, that’s on purpose, as Google has quietly retired the feature.

Responding to a question about the cached link on Twitter/X, Google’s Search Liason Danny Sullivan officially confirmed that, yes, cached webpages are no longer accessible through search results.

The “cached” button has, for years, appeared alongside all search results to show a slightly older version of the webpage as it was captured and seen by Google. Often, this was useful for pinning down a recent change to a site, or accessing information when a website goes down. Years ago, the link appeared under an overflow menu next to a search result, but in recent years moved under the “About This Result” overlay.

For the time being, you can still use the operator “cache:[insert URL]” in Google Search to access these pages, but that functionality is also being removed soon.

Google’s reasoning for removing these features is not laid out in Sullivan’s post, unfortunately, but the “cached” link hasn’t been visible in Search for quite some time now.

Sullivan also tosses in a personal opinion, theorizing a future where the “cached” link is replaced with a link to The Internet Archive’s capture of a webpage. This isn’t something that’s in the works right now, he clarifies, but indeed it would be a neat, even more useful replacement.

Did you use the “cached” link in Google Search?

More on Google:

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