Raw square brackets in a URL and their percent-encoded version, %5B and %5D, are different URLs, Google Search Advocate John Mueller said on Bluesky Monday. He wrote that he would have assumed they were equivalent and that he “probably gave people the wrong answer on this in the past.”

Google will crawl both versions, he said; if it finds they contain identical information it will eliminate duplication and pick one version; he recommends you choose one format to utilize across all links, canonical tags, sitemaps, and your structured data. The rules for duplicate formats apply equally to spaces, plus signs, and “%20,” he said.

Why Encoded Brackets Are A Different URL

Mueller traced the difference to RFC 3986 , the internet standard for URI syntax, which puts brackets and plus signs in its reserved set of characters.…