Is Your Rank Tracker Lying to You?
Google rankings have been bumpy for about a month now. Daily scores have stayed in the moderate-high range since late September and peaked near 7.9 in early October. Since then they've eased off and settled around 6.7 over the last two days. Today's early readings disagree wildly: Serpstat shows 10/10 while Algoroo shows 3.6. Part of the reason is probably that the tools themselves are getting bad data.
New Nozzle data shows Google is sending fake-looking results to rank trackers. These pages look normal but have the usual sites swapped out. Since September 13, 8.4% of SERPs came back poisoned, compared to 0.17% before. Poisoning peaked at 28.6% on September 29. It eased to about 3% on October 14, but then crept back up to 7.0% on October 18. The big vendors admit it. SE Ranking warned it "can cause keywords to show false drops or appear as not ranking, even when their actual positions haven't" changed. Nozzle's read is that this is Google's response to AI scraping, and rank trackers get caught along with the scrapers.
Forums Expect a Core Update
Site owners on forums are describing collapsing Discover traffic, Google News results stuck on old stories and Search Console data running days behind, and several now predict a core update. Google hasn't confirmed anything. Still, one prediction model points to late October to mid-November as the most likely window, and it expects the update to go after mass-produced, low-value AI content.
Smaller Changes From Yesterday
- On some AI Overviews, the desktop version is missing the AI Overview label, while the mobile version has the AI Overview label.
- Google is testing a new way to verify Business Profiles: uploading a photo of your government ID.
What to Do
- If your tracker shows a big drop, check the Performance report in Search Console before you panic. If Console kept the clicks, the rankings didn't vanish.
- Go through your thin or AI-produced pages now, before a possible core update lands.
