It's been this way for ages, although for chrome (iirc) this is managed via hyperlink auditing [1] which allows google to track what you're clicking even though

It's been this way for ages, although for chrome (iirc) this is managed via hyperlink auditing [1] which allows google to track what you're clicking even though the link appears 'clean'. The click through google redirect also allows them to track things like relevancy of the content and time on site (if you return to google SERP by clicking the back button), in-case the target site isn't using google analytics (unfortunately most sites do). [1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage /links.html#hyperlink-auditing Hyperlink auditing can be blocked with uBlock Origin / uMatrix