Google ved Decoder

What the ved parameter is

ved is a short code Google attaches to the links on its search results pages. When you click a result, the ved travels with the click so Google can log which link was used: what kind of link it was, where it sat on the page and, in longer forms, roughly when the page was loaded. You will find it in the data-ved attributes in the page source, in google.com/url?...&ved= redirect links copied from results, and in the address bar after you click through to another Google page, such as a related search or the Images tab.

Google has never published a specification. Everything this decoder knows comes from community reverse-engineering: search marketers and digital forensics researchers compared many ved values with the links they came from. The format can change at any time, and some fields are still unexplained.

How to use the decoder

Paste one ved per line, or paste whole Google URLs. The decoder pulls out every ved= parameter it finds, including ones inside percent-encoded redirect links, and decodes each value as you type. Turn off Decode as I type for very large inputs and press Decode or Ctrl + Enter instead.

Each ved gets a card with a one-line summary, for example "Normal result, position 7 on page 2, previous page loaded about 5 Oct 2026 14:03:22 UTC", followed by your local time. Below that is a table with the field number, the plain-text key if the field has one, its name, value and meaning, and a collapsible raw view of the decoded bytes. Copy JSON and Download .json export every result at once. Numbers too large for JavaScript to hold exactly are written as strings so no digits are lost. Everything runs in your browser and nothing is sent to a server.

The three versions

The first character is a version marker. Version 1 is plain text: comma-separated key:value pairs. Versions 0 and 2 are base64-encoded protobuf, a compact binary format. The decoder accepts both base64 alphabets (with - and _, or + and /), with or without = padding. Version 0 comes in a short form with only a few numbers and a long form, starting 0ahUKEw, that also carries a timestamp.

Fields inside a ved

Protobuf fields are numbered, not named. These are the field numbers with an agreed meaning. Any other field is shown with its raw value and marked unknown.

Fields 13.1.2 and 13.1.3 are 4-byte values. Protobuf reads them little-endian, while some write-ups list the big-endian reading, so the table shows both to make it easy to compare with other sources.

Link types

Field 2 says what kind of link was clicked. These values have been matched to a link type:

Any other number is shown as "unknown type" followed by the number. Google adds new result features often, so unknown types are common, especially in recent ved values.

Reading position and page

Field 6 counts from 0 and starts again on every page, so the decoder adds 1 to show the position as people count it: r:6 is the seventh result. Field 7 holds the start position of the page. Dividing it by 10 and adding 1 gives the page number, so 1t:22,r:6,i:86,s:90 reads as position 7 on page 10. When field 7 is missing, the link was on page 1. The page number assumes 10 results per page, which matches how field 7 has been observed to step.

Position here means the order of the link on Google's page, which is not always the same as an organic rank. Ads, image packs, local results and other features can take positions too. For sub-results, such as the links inside a group, field 5 gives the position within that group.

The timestamp

In the long version 0 form and in version 2, field 13.1.1 is a number of microseconds since 1 January 1970 UTC. It is thought to be roughly the time the previous page loaded, not the moment of the click, so the decoder says "previous page loaded about". The time is shown in UTC and in your browser's time zone. Values that would fall before 2000 or after 2099 are shown as plain numbers instead of dates.

ved, ei and sxsrf

Google search URLs often carry two other opaque parameters next to ved. ei is commonly described as an identifier for one load of the results page, and sxsrf, as its name suggests, looks like a token against cross-site request forgery. Both are internal session tokens with no public description, and this tool does not decode them. To see what the documented parameters of a search URL do, such as q, hl, gl and start, paste the URL into the Google Search URL Generator.

Limits

• The format is reverse-engineered. Google can change it without notice, and a decoded value that looks plausible can still be wrong.
• A ved describes a link on a results page, not a person. None of the known fields holds an account, an IP address or the search query, and only Google can match a ved to its own logs.
• Links in newer features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode may use link types that aren't listed above.
• A ved alone does not tell you what was searched. The query is in the q parameter of the same URL, if it is there at all.

For rank tracking from scraped pages, the data-ved values let you tell link types apart. To turn a saved results page or a search API response into a table of ranked results, use the SERP Parser.

Sources

Google does not document ved. The field and link-type meanings here come from public reverse-engineering: Deed Poll Office's original 2013 write-up, Hindsight's notes on the newer versions and fields 13 and 15, and SerpApi's open source ved_decoder (MIT licence), whose example values are used in the tests.