Google is feeding rank trackers fake results. Which numbers can you still trust?
Published
You open a client report and a keyword dropped from 12 to 40 overnight. Nothing changed on the site. No update, no penalty. You start writing the "don't worry" email in your head. Here's the thing: the number might just be wrong.
What Google is doing
Google has been fighting the tools that pull its search results for months. That used to mean captchas and hard blocks. Now there's a sneakier move.
Instead of blocking a tracker, Google sometimes hands it a normal looking results page where many of the real sites are swapped out. In their place: social media profiles and forum threads. The page looks fine. It just isn't what a real searcher would see.
BrightLocal's co-founder and CEO, Myles Anderson, says it doesn't seem to touch page 1. It shows up on page 2 and beyond. So if you're watching anything below position 10, that's where the weird swings come from.
How big is it?
Nozzle looked at 27.5 million search result pages across 49 countries. Since mid September, 8.0% of pages were affected, up from 0.17% before. On the worst days, September 27 to 29, it hit about 25% to 27% of pages.
And it's not one tool's problem. Anderson says it hits the whole industry, including Semrush and Ahrefs, plus the data companies a lot of tools quietly run on, like DataForSEO and SerpApi. If you use two trackers, they can both be off in the same way.
Which numbers you can still trust
BrightLocal shared how each type of result is holding up:
- Google desktop and mobile results: significantly affected.
- Map Pack and Local Finder: less affected.
- Google Maps: not affected.
Inside BrightLocal itself, the Local Rank Tracker is affected, while the Local Search Grid is not.
That's good news if you work with local businesses. For a plumber or a roofer, the real question is usually "do people nearby find us on the map?" Map grid tools answer that, and their data is the safest right now.
What to do this week
- Lean on map grids for local visibility. Local Falcon starts at $24.99 a month. Whitespark Local Ranking Grids starts at $10 a month. BrightLocal (from $31 a month, billed yearly) has its grid tool too.
- Trust page 1, question the rest. Big drops below position 10 deserve a second look before anyone panics. That goes for Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking, Moz Pro and the rest.
- Tell your clients before they ask. A short note saying "rankings past page 1 are noisy right now, here's why" builds more trust than explaining a scary drop after the fact.
- Check Search Console. It's Google's own data, so it isn't scraped. If clicks and impressions are steady, the business is probably fine.
BrightLocal says it's adding more data providers and working on fixes, but that there's no single fix for anyone in the industry. Earlier, in September, it explained why: AI companies lean on Google's results, so Google is cracking down hard on anything that pulls them automatically. Rank trackers are caught in the middle.
If you're weighing map tools, we compared them side by side in the best local rank trackers, with prices checked on each tool's own page.