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I posted this question in the YT video comments: For URLs with characters that can be encoded (brackets, plus signs, spaces), does Google treat the encoded version as a distinct URL? (example.com/category?filter[]=123 vs. example.com/category?filter%5B%5D=123 used in links vs. canonical values).

Well, TIL. I would have assumed they're equivalent, but they're NOT. This was a fun side-track. "?filter[]=123" ≠ "?filter%5B%5D=123" because in RFC 3986, Section 2.2 the characters brackets ([, ]) and plus signs (+) are defined as part of the reserved set.

"URIs that differ in the replacement of a reserved character with its corresponding percent-encoded octet are not equivalent. Percent-encoding a reserved character, or decoding a percent-encoded octet that corresponds to a reserved character, will change how the URI is interpreted by ...