Link prefetching is generally something you would want a website to retain control over, because it can distort stats, cause resource starvation, and even (when web developers are idiots) cause things like deletions (when a clickable link has a destructive outcome).

I am reminded of the infamous time when DHH had to have it explained to him that GET requests shouldn’t have side effects, after the Rails scaffolding generated CRUD deletes on GET requests.

https://dhh.dk/arc/000454.html

Google were not doing anything wrong here, and DHH was merely trying to deflect blame for the incompetence of the Rails design.

But the fact remains, alas, that this kind of pattern of mistakes is so common, prefetching by default has risks.