Since September, Google has been making it harder for automated tools to collect search results, and it keeps changing how it does so. This is behind the ranking changes seen across the industry in September and October.
On an average, around 8% of the daily results Google returns to us come back degraded, meaning incomplete or incorrect. Each one is checked and retried to get a healthy result before anything is recorded in the platform.
Since September, rank trackers across the industry have shown sudden ranking changes that people searching in Google weren't seeing. The September incident and the October one have the same source: Google is making it harder for automated tools to collect search results, and it keeps changing how it does so. This page explains what Google is doing, what it has meant for SEOmonitor in each phase, and what we do about it.
Two other things have overlapped with this and are easy to confuse with it: Google's September 2026 spam update, and a pattern of first-page volatility on some keywords. Both are covered further down.
What Google is doing
Rank trackers check rankings by searching Google automatically. For about a year, Google has been changing how it responds to those searches.
SISTRIX describes "smaller and larger changes to how search results are delivered almost every week" since Google dropped the option to load 100 results on a single page in September 2025. The pace has picked up over the past two months:
Late August: Google rolled out google.com/goto redirects on result links. Tools now have to follow each redirect to see which website a result belongs to.
Early to mid-September: DemandSphere describes the harshest blocking it has seen starting around September 11. On September 16, SISTRIX reported that its data collection was running at a reduced rate after Google "made further changes to the way search results are delivered." Two days later, Search Engine Roundtable reported that Nozzle saw roughly an 80% drop in the data it could collect from Google.
September 26: SISTRIX posted that Google "is currently returning incomplete or distorted search results in some cases." It limited updates to data that passed an additional quality check.
Early October: The incorrect results changed form. On October 7, DemandSphere described spurious results appearing in Google's pages when Google suspects automated traffic, and measured about 11% of its daily results as affected, a figure it called preliminary.
Other platforms have published similar notices. SE Ranking says the changes "affect SEO platforms across the industry." Advanced Web Ranking describes a "dual-SERP reality," in which the page Google returns to an automated search can differ from the page a person sees.
In practice, Google now sometimes answers an automated search with a page that looks like a normal result page but carries incomplete or incorrect results.
How it showed up in SEOmonitor & What was Done
From September 26. Google began sending back results that were both incomplete and incorrect. Pages were missing, and the results that did come back didn't match what people actually see. In the platform that looked like sudden drops or spikes.
What we did in September
Google's incorrect results at that point carried signs inside the page itself. We used those to recognise them with a high degree of confidence and keep them out of the platform. All affected keywords were reprocessed between 26th - 28th September and until 8th October SEOmonitor was keeping bad data from the platform.
From around October 9. A large set of incorrect results stopped carrying the signs that had given them away, and became far harder to tell apart from real ones. For a few days, between October 9 and 13, some of the incorrect results were recorded in the platform. They showed up as ranking swings on the affected keywords, around 10% of all of the tracked keywords across that timeframe were affected, with most Visibility movements staying small, and affected keywords have been reprocessed on the 13th.
What we did in October, and how the approach differs
The September check relied on how Google built the page. That is the part Google keeps changing, and in early October it changed again, so the signs we were reading were no longer reliable.
On October 13 we put a different kind of check in place. For every keyword SEOmonitor crawls, the platform analyses the result’s content to identify the wrong SERP and then reprocess it to avoid bad data being registered in the platform.
Three things follow from this solution:
It doesn't depend on how Google builds the page. Google can keep altering the format. The check follows the content.
It works keyword by keyword. Each keyword is judged against its own recent history.
It stops incorrect results before they reach you. The check runs as results arrive, so the data you see is the data that passed it.
Two other things that can look similar
Google's September 2026 spam update. Google released the September 2026 spam update on September 24, and the rollout finished on October 8. A spam update improves the automated systems Google uses to identify pages that break its spam policies. As those pages lose ground, the results around them reshuffle, and many sites saw rankings change up as well as down. These changes are real. They usually hold across consecutive days, and they tend to show up as matching changes in Search Console impressions and clicks, and in analytics traffic for the same pages.
First-page volatility on some keywords. Since earlier this year, a small portion of keywords has been switching between page one and not ranking at all. Depending on when the search runs, a page can rank 3rd, be missing from the results a few minutes later (showing as 99+ in SEOmonitor), and then be back at 3rd. This volatility is real. It reflects what Google returns at the moment of each search, and it can be reproduced when people search in Google themselves.
Because a single search can catch a page in or out of the results, one sudden drop on its own doesn't tell you much. To stop a momentary drop-out from showing as a lasting loss, SEOmonitor has safeguards in place. For example, unusually large drops, such as a keyword falling out of the top five or dropping to 99+ from the top 50, may keep their previous rank for up to two daily updates. In that time, we check whether Google keeps returning the lower position. More detail is in our Help Center: Fail-safe mechanisms.
This pattern often doesn't register in Search Console. Average position there is based on impressions across all searches, so an intermittent drop-out rarely shows unless it persists.
What to expect
The data matters. Search data is how teams make decisions, which is why the whole industry has an interest in getting it, and why keeping incorrect data out of the platform is what we put first.
Each time Google changes the picture, our job is to adjust our checks so the rankings you see stay the rankings people see in Google and ensure we communicate throughout.
If something still looks off
If a ranking still doesn't look right, please send it to us, and we will look into it on our end.
If you'd like to check it yourself first, the step-by-step is in our Help Center guide: Why am I seeing different ranks in the browser than in the platform?
We'll update this page as Google's changes develop and as our improvements go live.