Google has killed off one of its oldest features, removing cache links from its search results.

As The Verge points out, the feature allowed users to see websites the way Google saw them, providing valuable information that could be used for troubleshooting, SEO improvement, journalistic research, and more. In a post on X (Twitter), the company confirmed the change.

Hey, catching up. 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: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289

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.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison), February 1, 2024