Looker Studio - Disable "Warnings for external links" Feature

[steveng]

I noticed a new feature released on December 17, 2024, that forces users to visit a warning page before accessing external links embedded in reports.

Reference: Release Notes

Now, every external report link is prepended with https://www.google.com/url?q=, resulting in users encountering a page like this before reaching their destination:

This change has significantly impacted the experience for our users, as we rely heavily on external links in our reports. The additional step disrupts their workflow and creates unnecessary friction.

• Is there a way to disable this behavior?
• If not, could you please provide some insight into the reasoning behind this feature?

I don’t want to understate how frustrating this is for our users, so any guidance or options to improve the situation would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Steven

[schristensen]

This is what support responded me:

"This feature is to warn users about malicious links. This is being done to prevent users from using Looker Studio for spam and phishing. So, Looker Studio is not providing admins or report creators with a way to disable this functionality. This feature protects users from bad actors who may want them to think they're staying within Google sites but in fact are sending them to external sites, e.g., for phishing. This also protects users from being exposed to illegal content.

The feature was an incremental release to a few number of users and now it's 100% rollout to all the users."

We too rely heavily in report links and is extremely frustrating this new interaction. Really hope they provide a tool to sort this out in a better way. Regards

[ArkadyZagdan]

@steveng Consider adding feature request. Hopefully it can get tons of thumbs up and get noticed.

[schristensen]

Hi here is a request in the feedback system, you can help to solve this by upvoting the request, thanks. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/391172470