Google Cache Is Now Fully Dead

Google has now totally disabled the Google Cache from completely working. Earlier this year, Google removed the cache link from the search result snippets. Then a couple of weeks ago, added links to the Wayback Machine. Now, the direct link to see the Google Cache has been fully disabled.

If you try to go directly to the Google Cache – something I have tried literally every day since Google removed the links from the search results – Google will now show nothing:

Here is the link I’ve been trying daily at this link:

Google Cache Dead

This stopped working in the past 12 hours or so.

There are a lot of people chattering about it on social:

As a reminder, Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, said on X:

Yes, it’s been removed. I know, it’s sad. I’m sad too. It’s one of our oldest features. But it was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.
Personally, I hope that maybe we’ll add links to @internetarchive from where we had the cache link before, within About This Result. It’s such an amazing resource. For the information literacy goal of About The Result, I think it would also be a nice fit — allowing people to easily see how a page changed over time. No promises. We have to talk to them, see how it all might go — involves people well beyond me. But I think it would be nice all around.

As a reminder, anyone with a Search Console account can use URL Inspector to see what our crawler saw looking at their own page.

You’re going to see cache: go away in the near future, too. But wait, I hear you ask, what about noarchive? We’ll still respect that; no need to mess with it. Plus, others beyond us use it.

Here are some of those posts:

So he told use the cache: operator would go away in the “near future.” That took 9 months or so to happen and now it is gone.

Forum discussion at BlackHatWorld.

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