The world’s biggest search engine, Google, certainly likes to keep us SEOs on our toes. 

Not only does Google frequently drop updates which can shake even the most solid of SEO strategies, but as of late, the search engine giant has also been feeding inaccurate results to the tools we use for reporting. 

So for once, ‘bad news’ on your SEO reports might not be anything of the sort. 

However, these so-called “poisoned SERPs” are something you need to know about, whether you have an SEO agency or handle your SEO in-house.

That’s because you could end up making changes to content that actually is performing really well. Likewise, your SEO team might be doing a fantastic job, but the tools may say otherwise.

In this post, Imaginaire’s SEO specialists are here to explain what has been going on in a way we hope will be easy to understand.

‘Poisoned SERPs’ - what’s been happening? 

SEO specialists use various tools such as AccuRanker, Ahrefs, TrueRanker, Nozzle and Semrush. These tools tell us a lot about your website, including the ranking position of its keywords. 

However, recently, Google has been feeding inaccurate results to various SEO rank trackers. As a result, this may have shown that keyword rankings have dropped sharply on a particular rank tracking tool (i.e. Semrush or Ahrefs). 

However, when that keyword was checked live on Google, there was no such drop at all. Likewise, on Google Search Console, no sharp changes would have been detected. 

Example: Your keyword for ‘Nottingham pet store’ was at position #1 on Google in September 2026. However, your SEO tool reported that it had dropped to position #98. This creates false panic, as in fact, when this is checked on the live results, it’s still at position #1. 

Any tool that collects Google results by scraping is exposed and the differences come down to how well each vendor filters the bad pages out.

Which SEO tools have been affected?

Poisoned SERPs aren’t limited to one platform. Any rank tracker that collects Google results automatically is exposed. The main difference between tools is how well each one spots and filters out the bad data.

Nozzle, the rank tracker that first published research on the issue, found that 8% of the results pages it collected from mid-September to early October had been altered, compared with just 0.17% beforehand. DemandSphere reported a higher rate of around 11% of its daily checks.

Other providers have reported much lower figures. AccuRanker says its poisoned share sat between roughly 1% and 2% across 22 markets, even on days when Nozzle measured far higher rates. 

Semrush has confirmed it has been seeing the problem since late summer but says the impact on its users’ tracked rankings has been limited.

SEO professionals have also noticed differences between tools in practice. In one widely shared example, a site’s ranking drop and recovery showed up in Ahrefs, appeared later in Semrush and didn’t register in SISTRIX at all.

What to do about it 

Maybe you manage your SEO in-house or have an agency manage it for you. 

Our advice to you if your reports show sharp ranking drops is not to panic or change anything straight away. 

First, whoever is overseeing your SEO should check Google Search Console for the same pages and keywords. If clicks and impressions held steady, the drop is almost certainly bad tracking data rather than a real loss. 

Next, look at actual traffic and enquiries in GA4, since those reflect real visitors. If you use more than one rank tracker, compare them and recheck the keyword a few days later, as most false drops correct themselves quickly. 

Only investigate further if Search Console confirms a decline, bearing in mind Google’s September spam update. Finally, annotate reports from mid-September onwards so future comparisons make sense.

Why did this even happen?

Google hasn’t said anything officially, so nobody knows for certain. But the widely accepted explanation is that it’s trying to stop AI companies from scraping its search results.

AI tools like ChatGPT and other answer engines need fresh, accurate web results to ground their responses and some of them get those results by scraping Google at huge scale, often through residential proxy networks that disguise automated requests as ordinary users. Google has a strong commercial reason to stop competitors building products on the back of its own index and its spam policies already prohibit automated scraping without permission.

Simply blocking scrapers doesn’t work very well, because a blocked request just tells the scraper to try again from a different IP address. Serving a page that looks completely normal but contains the wrong results is far more effective, since the scraper has no way of knowing the data is bad and stores it as genuine. Nozzle’s research suggests Google blocked first and then switched to poisoning.

Rank trackers are essentially collateral damage. They collect Google results in exactly the same way as AI scrapers, so Google’s systems can’t easily tell them apart.

It’s also part of a larger trend. Over the past couple of years, Google has started requiring JavaScript to load search results, stopped letting tools pull 100 results in a single request and begun routing result links through redirects. Each change has made Google’s results harder and more expensive to collect from the outside and with AI search competition only growing, most commentators expect poisoning to be a permanent feature rather than a temporary blip.

No, SEO is not ‘dead’

Yes, stuff like this is a challenge to deal with, whether you’re an SEO specialist or a business which pays someone to handle your SEO for you. However, it is all part and parcel of how SEO and indeed, the wider internet continues to evolve on a daily basis.

Make no mistake that SEO isn’t going anywhere. Google receives between 8.5 billion and 13.7 billion searches every day. Over the course of the year, that adds up to over 5 trillion Google searches. 

SEO remains as valuable as ever for any business. But, it does require a keen eye to understand the latest industry trends and changes. That’s why SEO remains a professional skill set that is crucial for growing your business online. 

Worried about your SEO reports?

If your rankings have taken a sudden dive, it doesn’t necessarily mean your website has lost visibility. With Google feeding rank trackers inaccurate data, it’s more important than ever to look beyond a single tool and understand what’s really happening with your organic performance.

At Imaginaire, our SEO team cross-checks ranking data against Google Search Console, analytics and real enquiries, so you can make decisions based on what’s actually happening rather than what a dashboard says. Whether you need a second opinion on a worrying report or a full review of your search performance, we’re here to help.

Get in touch with our team today to find out where your website really stands and how we can help it grow.