Google Search to Discontinue Country-Level Domains

Google announced yesterday that it will soon stop using country code top-level domain names (ccTLD) for its search engine. The company said that it will be redirecting traffic from country-level domains such as google.fr for France to google.com without any impact on users’ search experience.

As Google explained on its blog, ccTLDs for Google Search used to provide locally relevant search results. However, that’s no longer the case after the main google.com domain started providing a local experience to all users eight years ago.

“In 2017, we began providing the same experience with local results for everyone using Search, whether they were using google.com or their country’s ccTLD. Because of this improvement, country-level domains are no longer necessary,” the company explained.

In the coming months, all Google users around the world will be redirected to google.com. Google said that users may be asked to re-enter some of their search preferences during this transition process, but nothing else will change. “It won’t affect the way Search works, nor will it change how we handle obligations under national laws,” the company emphasized.

Google.com remains the most visited website worldwide according to data from Similarweb, followed by YouTube and Facebook. ChatGPT.com ranked #7 in the company’s data compiled on March 1, 2025, surpassing wikipedia.org. That probably tells something about how people look for information on the Internet in this new age of AI chatbots.