Google Cache Is 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:

This stopped working in the past 12 hours or so.

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

Google has removed the ability to check cache manually, just happened today. It didn't work on every site, but you could see the cache on new pages temporarily.https://t.co/AMffKaKrbM

Now it just redirects to a search result with cache: in front of the domain. @rustybrick

— SEOwner (@tehseowner) September 24, 2024

cache:https://t.co/IR03XZd2iZ is cache operator no more? I have checked many website, no one site is showing cache page. So I think this is no more from now. What you think guys?@JohnMu @rustybrick

— Rajesh Prajapati (@prajapatiseo) September 24, 2024

In India, Google have completely stopped giving cache copy of indexed pages.
Tried on more than 10 to 20 websites.

I think they have completed this rollout in India.@JohnMu @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/fWmQTUfD6p

— Nilesh Yadav (@Nilesh__Yadav) September 24, 2024

hi @rustybrick @JohnMu

Google Cache is not working. Is this a Google bug, or is only my website facing this issue? pic.twitter.com/rHw4EZMxcO

— Akshay Kumar Sharma (@alexsharma111) September 24, 2024

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:

Update! We've now added links to previous versions of webpages from the Internet Archive. Learn more in the post below: https://t.co/qbYUi8iSoI

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) September 11, 2024

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.

What are your alternatives? So, yea, the Wayback Machine or the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console or Google's rich result testing tool.

Forum discussion at BlackHatWorld.

Update: After this story was published, Google confirmed the cache operator no longer works. Google posted, "The cache: search operator no longer works in Google Search."

Google has now officially confirmed the cache operator is no longer working - story updated at https://t.co/wHb5HuQnJ6 pic.twitter.com/xLWggZy9Vg

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) September 24, 2024

Google also removed it from the docs, so the old version of search operators had this:

This story was originally published at 6am ET but updated at 7:52am ET.