Rank Trackers Are Getting Poisoned Google SERPs. Here's How I Check Drops With the Search Console API
If your rank tracker showed a page-one keyword falling off a cliff in late September and then coming back a few days later, it may not have been your site at all. According to a study Nozzle published on October 10, Google has been serving some rank trackers search result pages that look completely normal but have the results swapped out. I spent the last couple of days reading the data and…
Rank trackers, used by SEO agencies to monitor keyword positions on search engine results pages (SERPs), may be encountering issues as Google appears to be poisoning these pages. These poisoned SERPs have been observed by Nozzle, an enterprise rank tracker, which found that 8.0% of 17.8 million SERPs analyzed since September 13 were poisoned, compared to just 0.17% during the baseline period from August 20 to September 9.
The peak of poisoned SERPs occurred between September 27 and 29, reaching around 27.0% on September 29. Poisoned pages retain only 20.7% of the usual organic sites, while normal pages retain 88.5%. For keywords where a project's own site is among the usual results, it was missing from the top 10 on 58.6% of poisoned SERPs, compared to 2.7% in the baseline.
77.9% of poisoned SERPs saw their usual sites return within three days, and 80% of spells lasted only a single fetch. This issue may be related to Google's September 2026 spam update, which began on September 24 and ran for 13 days. The problem is not yet resolved, as TrueRanker reported that most obviously irrelevant results are now fixed, but Google is still serving pages with the correct query but not the real results.
Developers should be aware that this issue affects not only SEO agencies but also any tool that relies on SERP data, such as internal dashboards, scrapers, AI visibility trackers, and AI Overview citations. To verify the accuracy of their own site's performance, developers can use Google Search Console, which provides a source of truth with real search data that can't be poisoned.
A Python script has been developed to automate the process of checking for drops in rankings using the Search Console API. This script takes a CSV file with date, query, and position (empty when the site wasn't found) and compares it with the data from Search Console for a specified number of days.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
