Your rank tracking dashboard may be more confident than it should be. DemandSphere says Google is now returning “spurious” results on roughly 11% of the search pages it collects each day. Nozzle puts the share of poisoned result pages at 8.0%. The two vendors are describing the same shift: some September and early October 2026 SEO reports may not match what real searchers saw.
What changed since July
According to DemandSphere founder and CEO Ray Grieselhuber, the disruption came in waves. In July, law enforcement seized the NetNut proxy network, which Google’s Threat Intelligence Group estimated controlled at least 2 million devices. That removed a large provider from the residential IP pools rank trackers rely on.
In August, Google confirmed it was rolling out google.com/goto redirects on organic result links. A result that once pointed at a landing page now passes through a Google redirect first. If a tool reads that link without resolving it, every destination can look like google.com.
Then, around September 11, Grieselhuber says Google deployed the most aggressive blocking his company has seen. By early October, DemandSphere reported a new failure mode: suspected bot traffic sometimes received complete SERPs that looked normal but showed rankings real users never saw.
Why a normal-looking result is the real problem
A blocked request creates a gap that a vendor can see and flag. A spurious page looks legitimate and produces a confident number. Grieselhuber says Google “does not want the AI labs to use their SERPs as part of their live retrieval process to answer questions,” and rank trackers are collateral damage in that fight.
The goto redirects alone break several standard report inputs:
- Destination URLs all appear to point to google.com
- Domain matching fails, so your own pages stop being recognized
- Share-of-voice and competitor attribution get calculated against the wrong domains
- Historical trend lines break on the rollout date
What to do with this
Treat any single rank tracker as a sample, not ground truth. If you see a dramatic loss in a top-ten position, check it in a second tool before you react. Annotate reports from September and early October: Google’s September spam update ran from September 24 to October 8 and would have caused real volatility that is easy to confuse with tracker noise.
Ask your rank data vendor for second-order data: error rates, sampling rates, and how much of each day’s collection is complete. DemandSphere has responded with an Observability feature that reports those figures alongside rankings. It argues that no comparable vendor currently publishes that level of detail as part of the product.
The AI Overview signal
DemandSphere also reported that branded AI Overviews more than tripled in September, from 26.12% of tracked branded keywords on September 1 to 82.06% on September 29. Independent checks pointed the same way: Chris Long of Nectiv found AI Overviews for 93 of 100 enterprise brands, though many appeared mid-page or lower. That shift matters even after rank data clears up, because it changes which positions actually win attention.
Source: PPC Land
