Broken deprecation link in GET /search/code response headers

[bugron]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

API

Body

The GET /search/code endpoint returns a deprecation URL in the Link response header that leads to a 404 page.

Broken URL: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-03-27-deprecation-of-api-search-code-fields

Navigating to it displays "Whoops, we haven't written that blog post yet!"

Reproduction

Make a request to GET https://github.com/api/search/code?q=hello. The response includes:

Link: <https://github.blog/changelog/2026-03-27-deprecation-of-api-search-code-fields>; rel="deprecation"; type="text/html"
Deprecation: Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT
Sunset: Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The rel="deprecation" link is expected to point to documentation about the deprecation but the target page doesn't exist. As a result, API consumers have no way to learn what fields are being deprecated or how to migrate.

Please either:

1. Publish the referenced changelog post, or
2. Update the Link header to point to existing documentation that describes the deprecation

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[Gecko51]

Good catch. The deprecation header is pointing to a blog post URL that doesn't exist yet, which kind of defeats the purpose of including deprecation metadata in the first place.

Looking at the headers you shared, there are three pieces of info: the deprecation date (March 27, 2026), the sunset date (September 27, 2026), and the broken link. So it looks like GitHub is planning to deprecate certain fields from the /search/code response, with a 6-month window before they actually get removed.

The most likely scenario is that the engineering team added the deprecation headers to the API before the blog/changelog team published the corresponding post. It's happened before with other API deprecations, the headers ship first and the docs lag behind by a few days or sometimes longer.

In the meantime, you can keep an eye on the actual changelog at https://github.blog/changelog/ and filter for API-related posts. The deprecation is probably about removing some of the legacy fields from the code search response (the old code search API has been slowly getting replaced by the new one).

For practical purposes: your code won't break until the sunset date in September 2026. Once the blog post goes live it should clarify exactly which fields are going away and what the migration path looks like.

You could also try hitting the new code search endpoint if you haven't already migrated. It uses a different response format and is the one GitHub is actively maintaining going forward.

Reporting it here is the right move. The broken link is clearly a bug on their end, just a matter of the changelog post catching up to the API change.