Google is serving rank trackers complete-looking search pages with the organic listings swapped out, and the numbers are no longer a rounding error. Nozzle, the rank-tracking company behind the research, counted 8.0% of the pages it collected since September 13 as “poisoned,” up from 0.17% before.
What Nozzle found
The study covered 27.5 million SERPs collected between September 13 and October 9, across 49 countries and desktop, iPhone and Android. Of the 17.8 million pages with enough history to judge, 8.0% were poisoned. The first blocked requests appeared in bulk on September 13, the first swapped pages on September 20, and poisoning peaked at 27.0% on September 29. Since October 1 it has run between roughly 5% and 11% a day.
Nozzle defines a poisoned page by comparing it against each keyword’s usual top-10 sites. On poisoned pages, only 20.7% of organic sites carried over from the previous collection, versus 88.5% at baseline. Most worrying for brands and agencies: a tracked site disappeared from the top 10 on 58.6% of poisoned pages, compared with 2.7% at baseline.
The replacements were not random. Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Quora all gained top-10 share on poisoned pages, while YouTube, Yelp and MapQuest lost ground. Paid listings behaved differently: ads were kept 83.7% of the time on poisoned pages, against 70.6% at baseline. Nozzle offers no explanation for that gap.
The numbers vary wildly by vendor
AccuRanker published its own detection method and much lower rates. On September 29, when Nozzle measured 27%, AccuRanker put its own poisoned share at 1.4% — a difference of about 19x. AccuRanker checks a sample of one in every 200 tracked keywords and flags pages when the top 10 keeps fewer than half the sites seen the day before and the day after. Nozzle compares against a three-week baseline, so the figures are not directly comparable.
- Nozzle: 8.0% of SERPs poisoned since September 13; peak daily rate 27.0% on September 29.
- AccuRanker: 1.47% from October 1–9; September 29 rate 1.4%.
- Most swaps clear fast: 80% lasted a single collection, and 77.9% of usual sites returned within three days.
Semrush says it has seen the issue since late summer, has added checks to filter and double-check results, and calls the impact on users “limited.” SE Ranking flagged missing positions for some keywords, and SISTRIX has retreated to top-10 data, calling positions beyond that no longer reliably comparable.
What marketers should do
The dangerous part is not blocked requests, which show up as gaps. A poisoned page is stored as if it were real. That means September and early-October client decks may contain drops that never happened in front of actual searchers — and the window overlaps Google’s September spam update, which did produce real demotions.
Before you report a ranking drop:
- Check the same keyword in Search Console and at least two rank trackers.
- Ask your vendor whether — and how — it filters poisoned SERPs, and what its sampling rate is.
- Recheck after three days; most false drops resolve quickly.
Google has made no public statement on how long the poisoning will continue. AccuRanker’s data shows smaller rounds as far back as late January 2026, and levels from April to July ran seven to ten times higher than 2025. This looks less like a one-off incident than a new cost of collecting Google rankings.
Source: PPC Land
