“Historically, as a part of our process to provide localized results, we’ve used country code top-level domain names (ccTLD), such as google.ng for Nigeria or google.com.br for Brazil,” Google wrote in a blog post on Tuesday, April 15, 2025.

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However, “over the years, our ability to provide a local experience has improved,” the company wrote, adding that it is no longer necessary to have country-level domains since Google has been providing localized results since 2017.

Google also said that the change will be rolled out gradually over the coming months, and users may be prompted to re-enter some of their Search preferences in the process.

Though this update will change what people see in their browser address bar, it won’t affect the way Search works, nor will it change how Google handles obligations under national laws.

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The AI angle

While it is not mentioned by the company, another possible reason for the change may be to help better integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into search engine results and possibly reduce the associated costs as well.

Google's AI Overviews is the tool it uses for this purposes and the way it works is by scouring through a range of online sources to answer questions the users have entered in the search.

It also cites all the sources for its output.

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AI Overviews has also recently been increasing the number of links it cites as sources, but some of these extra links are links to search pages as opposed to actual websites, according to 9To5Google.