From September 26, rank trackers across the industry showed sudden ranking changes that people searching in Google weren't seeing. Two separate things in Google overlapped:

Separately, a small portion of keywords has been affected by a different kind of volatility since earlier this year. We cover that further down.

Rank trackers check rankings by searching Google automatically.

Over the past year, Google has been changing how it responds to these searches. On September 26, a further change meant 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 rank trackers, that looked like sudden drops or spikes. People searching in Google weren't seeing those changes.

Here's what we've put in place:

Google released the September 2026 spam update on September 24. It said the rollout may take up to two weeks.

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. Many sites see rankings change during the rollout, up as well as down.

These changes are real. They usually hold across consecutive days. They also tend to show up as matching changes in Search Console impressions and clicks, and in analytics traffic for the same pages.

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.

Google has been changing how it serves results to rank trackers for about a year. 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 picked up over the past two months:

Other platforms have published similar notices. SE Ranking says the changes "affect SEO platforms across the industry" and that "some keywords also show fewer results than normal." 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.

If a ranking still doesn't look right, send us the campaign, keyword and location. We'll 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.