It should be obvious, they are doing this for a reason to benefit themselves.

As others have elaborated, the reasons are so they can track who you are and sell your profile advertising.

> the reasons are so they can track who you are and sell your profile advertising.

What? Like they weren’t doing this before? Obviously Google’s telemetry is tracking every link you click regardless; there’s no extra tracking benefit to this.

The reason they’re doing this seems to be to stop competitors from scraping their search results.