Do hyphens in URLs still matter for SEO in 2026?

What did Google actually change about hyphens in URLs?

Google didn't change its advice. It changed how it explains that advice. In October 2026 it updated the URL structure section of its Search Central documentation to say why it prefers hyphens: hyphens clearly signal a word boundary, while underscores are commonly used to keep concepts together. Programming is the obvious example, where a function name like format_date is meant to be read as one unit. The page still sorts its examples into recommended and not recommended. Hyphens between words are recommended. Underscores between words, and words jammed together with no separator, are not. The recommendation itself goes back years. What's new is the reasoning, which gives site owners a clear explanation instead of a rule to take on faith.

What the update leaves out matters just as much. It doesn't announce a ranking penalty for underscores, and it doesn't tell anyone to rewrite old URLs. It doesn't even say exactly how Google processes underscores today. A lot of SEO blogs repeat the claim that Google reads seo_tips as one word, 'seotips'. That belief goes back to comments made by a Google spokesperson around 2008. The current documentation doesn't confirm it as a technical fact. It simply advises against underscores, partly for what it calls historical reasons. So treat the update as a clarification of good habits. Nothing has changed under the hood that suddenly demands action, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling a migration.

At Artiql we follow this closely for a simple reason. Every article we publish goes out on a short, hyphenated English slug, because clean URLs are one of the few parts of organic marketing you get right once and never touch again. Google's explanation backs up that habit. It also puts a decision in front of every business owner who reads it: should you go back and fix the URLs you already have? For most sites the honest answer is no. The rest of this article explains why, covers the cases where a change really does make sense, and looks at the extra choice Hebrew-language sites face between Hebrew-character URLs and English slugs.

Are hyphens vs underscores in URLs a ranking factor?

Hyphens vs underscores in URLs is a minor detail, not a meaningful ranking factor. The words in a URL give Google a light hint about what a page covers. That hint is dwarfed by the page's title, headings, body content, internal links and the links pointing at it from other sites. A page with a perfect slug and thin content won't outrank a thorough page sitting on an awkward underscore URL. Google also often shows a breadcrumb path in results instead of the raw URL, so many searchers never even see your separator. If you're choosing between fixing slugs and improving the content on those pages, improve the content. It isn't close.

Here's a slightly contrarian view: the hyphen-versus-underscore debate has eaten far more SEO attention than it deserves. It's an easy thing to argue about because anyone can check it, while the hard work of earning rankings goes unglamorous and undone. That said, readable URLs do help in ways that have little to do with algorithms. People scan a link before they click it in a search result, a chat thread or an email. A slug like /dental-implant-cost tells them what they're getting. When someone pastes your bare URL into a forum or newsletter, the URL becomes the link text, and words separated by hyphens read naturally there.

The same reasoning carries over to AI answer engines. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity learn what a page is about from its content, not mainly from its address. When an assistant cites your page, though, it often shows the link, and a descriptive slug helps a reader decide whether to click through. So the practical value of hyphens is real but small. They make URLs easier for machines to split into words and easier for people to trust at a glance. That's a good reason to use them on every new page. It isn't a reason to start a rewrite of everything you've published over the past ten years.

Should I change my URLs for SEO if they use underscores?

Usually not. If your existing underscore or run-together URLs are indexed and pulling in traffic, leave them alone and use hyphens from now on. Changing a URL means the old address has to send a permanent 301 redirect to the new one. Google does pass signals through 301 redirects, but it has to recrawl and reprocess every changed page first, and rankings often wobble for weeks or even months while that happens. On a large archive, that wobble hits hundreds or thousands of pages at the same moment. You'd be swapping a nearly invisible benefit for a very visible risk, and most businesses can't afford a quarter of shaky organic traffic.

The hidden costs pile up too. Every internal link, XML sitemap entry, canonical tag and hreflang reference has to be updated, or you'll leave redirect chains and conflicting signals behind. Backlinks from other sites will keep pointing at the old URLs for good, so they depend on your redirects working forever. Analytics reports split into before and after, which makes year-over-year comparisons messy. Social share counts often reset to zero. Ad campaigns, email templates, QR codes on printed materials and links in partner directories all need checking. None of this is impossible, but it's a real project with real failure points. And the payoff is a separator change Google itself doesn't describe as a ranking problem.

There are fair exceptions. If you're already migrating to a new platform, domain or site structure, URLs will change anyway, so that's the right time to move to hyphenated slugs. Do it once, as part of the same mapping. URLs stuffed with session IDs, tracking parameters, database numbers or random strings are worth cleaning up, because they cause duplicate content and crawling problems that go well beyond word separation. Pages that get almost no traffic or links carry little risk and can be fixed whenever it's convenient. Outside those cases, the smartest move is the boring one: freeze the old URLs and put your effort into publishing more good pages on clean slugs.

Hebrew URL slugs and SEO: Hebrew characters or English?

For new pages on a Hebrew site, a short English kebab-case slug is usually the more practical choice. Hebrew-character URLs are still fully valid for SEO. Google supports non-Latin characters in URLs, encoded as UTF-8, and its own guidance encourages using words in your audience's language. Hebrew URLs display properly in most browser address bars and in search results, so Google won't penalize a page for a slug written in Hebrew. The problem shows up elsewhere. When someone copies a Hebrew URL, it often turns into percent-encoding, where every Hebrew letter becomes a code like %D7%90. A short, friendly address suddenly becomes a wall of symbols.

That encoded string ends up wherever people share links: WhatsApp messages, emails, CRM records, spreadsheets, analytics reports and social posts. It looks broken, it's harder to trust, and the URL gets much longer, which can run into character limits in some tools. An English slug such as /he/root-canal-cost stays short and readable everywhere. It also keeps your URL structure consistent across language versions, with a /he/ folder for Hebrew and the same slug pattern for English. That makes hreflang setup and content management much simpler. You lose a small amount of keyword relevance in the URL for Hebrew searchers. Since URL words are a light signal anyway, that's usually a trade worth making.

Hyphens matter just as much on Hebrew sites. A Hebrew slug with spaces between words gets encoded as %20, which is ugly and fragile. If you keep Hebrew slugs, separate the words with hyphens, as you would in English. Existing Hebrew URLs follow the same logic as underscore URLs. If they rank and bring in leads, don't convert them to English just for neatness, because the redirect risk is identical. Set the convention for new pages and stick to it. The worst result is a site that switches between Hebrew URLs, English slugs and transliterations depending on who published the page. Inconsistency confuses your team far more than it confuses Google.

What are the URL structure best practices for 2026, and how do you redirect safely?

The best URL structure in 2026 is short, lowercase, hyphenated and stable. For every new page, write a slug of roughly three to six words that names the topic the way people search for it, like /hyphens-in-urls-seo rather than /blog/post_2026_10_seo_tips_final. Use lowercase only, because some servers treat uppercase and lowercase URLs as different pages. Leave dates out unless the content really is time-bound news. Don't repeat keywords, and don't pad slugs with filler words. Keep folder depth shallow and logical, so a page lives at /services/teeth-whitening rather than five levels down. Avoid tracking parameters in URLs you link internally. Above all, choose a slug you'll be happy with in five years, because a good URL should never need to change.

If a change really is unavoidable, plan it like the migration it is. Build a one-to-one map from every old URL to its closest new equivalent, and don't send everything to the homepage. Set up server-side 301 redirects and avoid chains, so each old address reaches its final destination in a single hop. Update internal links, canonical tags, hreflang annotations and XML sitemaps so they point straight at the new URLs. Keep the redirects in place for at least a year, and preferably for good, since backlinks never update themselves. Before you start, estimate how much organic traffic the affected pages bring in. Our SEO traffic calculator helps put a number on what's at stake.

Roll the change out in batches where you can, starting with low-traffic pages. Then watch Search Console for crawl errors, indexing drops and pages that lose their positions. That way, a mistake costs you a handful of pages instead of the whole site. The bigger lesson goes beyond hyphens. URLs are a permanent part of the organic asset you're building, and every page you publish on a clean slug keeps earning rankings and AI citations long after launch, while paid clicks stop the day the budget runs out. If you'd like to see how ready your existing pages are for AI answer engines, run them through our GEO score checker. And if you'd rather have a steady flow of well-structured, rankable articles published for you, book a short discovery call with the Artiql team.

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