Nozzle: Google returns false search results to SEO tools

Since 20 September, some data from external rank-tracking tools may be incorrect. This affects reports that marketers rely on to assess visibility and make budget decisions.

Nozzle, a provider of tools for tracking website positions in Google (rank tracking), published an analysis (opens in a new tab) on 10 October. It shows that since 20 September, the search engine has been deliberately returning incorrect results pages (SERPs) to bots that collect data at scale. Google does not reject such queries. Instead, it sends back a complete, credible-looking page with false results. According to Nozzle, this is a response to the scraping of results by AI companies, and SEO tools (used to monitor and improve website visibility in the search engine) were caught up in it incidentally.

Nozzle analyzed 63.1 million results pages from 49 countries. The peak of the phenomenon occurred on 27-29 September, when it affected 24-27 percent of the collected results. Since 1 October, it has been 5-11 percent per day. In total, since 13 September, 8 percent of the assessed results pages showed "poisoning," compared with 0.17 percent earlier. Measured against all 27.5 million results pages collected since 13 September, that is about 5.1 percent. In poisoned results, when the same query is searched again, only 20.7 percent of websites repeat, compared with 88.5 percent in normal results. Tracked client websites dropped out of the top ten on 58.6 percent of such results pages, compared with 2.7 percent under normal conditions. Ads and shopping results remain stable.

DemandSphere says that incorrect results currently affect about 11 percent of its daily measurements. The methodologies of the two companies differ, so the figures cannot be compared directly. Data problems were also reported by, among others, Sistrix, DataForSEO and SE Ranking. Google has not publicly commented on any of the analyses. Position fluctuations during this period may also have been influenced by Google's anti-spam update, which lasted from 24 September to 8 October.

According to Nozzle, 77.9 percent of poisoned results return to normal within three days. SEO specialist Brodie Clark advises checking whether a sudden drop in a tool is caused by a poisoned results page before reacting. For companies, this means that drops in position reports from recent weeks may not reflect reality. No anomalies have been reported in Google Search Console (Google's free panel for website owners).