Google has fully and completely killed off its cache operator. Google said it would do this after removing the cache link from the search result snippets back in January of this year but has not done until nine-months later.
Maybe Google waited to completely disable the cache operator until after it added links to the Wayback Machine as an alternative, which it did about two weeks ago.
What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of me trying the cache:seroundtable.com command in Google. This is something I’ve been trying daily since January, to see when it would be removed.
What Google said. Back in January, when Google removed the cache link, Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, told us:
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.
Now it is fully gone.
Why we care. I use the Wayback machine a lot for my research here and for other work related projects. Having quick access to these links in Google Search can be more useful for me and searchers. And now the cache operator is completely gone.
This should also help with some of the complaints around Google dropping the cache link but it does not resolve the complaints around seeing how Google sees your pages. But for that, you can use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console or the rich result testing tool from Google. But this may cause a bit more work for some SEOs going forward.
