Rank trackers are now saying out loud what many SEO teams suspected during September and October: some Google results pages are arriving incomplete, and the numbers in your dashboards may not be clean.
Ahrefs used the word “poisoning” and said it is cleaning up past results that may have been affected. SEOmonitor, AccuRanker, BrightLocal and SerpApi have each published their own descriptions of how suspect results are caught, held or reprocessed. No vendor has cited independent testing, and as of Oct. 22 Google had not commented.
How big is the problem?
Nozzle’s first-page poisoned count flags a result when fewer than half of a keyword’s normal first-page sites appear anywhere in the collected results. That threshold produced a jump: 8.7% of first pages were poisoned between Sept. 13 and Oct. 21, up from 0.17% between Aug. 20 and Sept. 9.
Other vendors give different windows and methods, so the figures are not identical. Ahrefs estimates 5% to 20% of search results have been affected in recent weeks, depending on the data provider. SEOmonitor says about 8% of Google results it receives each day are incomplete or incorrect, and around 10% of monitored keywords had issues from Oct. 9 to 13. AccuRanker’s stored-data check flagged 30.2% of a fixed sample of desktop keyword-days on Sept. 25, falling to 0.58% by Oct. 17.
Those are different denominators. One is raw Google responses, one is tracked keywords, one is a sample of stored rankings. The common thread is that the usual rank report may be carrying noise.
What vendors are doing
- Ahrefs: says filters reject abnormal results and request replacements, and it is cleaning up any affected past results.
- SEOmonitor: reprocessed incorrect results from Oct. 9–13 and now checks each result against the keyword’s recent history as results arrive.
- AccuRanker: refetches when a page loses most of its normal sites, and runs a “sandwich check” comparing day-to-day page-one overlap.
- BrightLocal: is adding backup data suppliers after CEO Myles Anderson said there is “no single fix that solves it completely.”
- SerpApi: deployed an update that should reduce the number of poisoned results returned through its API.
What to do before your next report
If you are reviewing a late-September or October drop, start by checking how your vendor reported in that window. SEOmonitor says it may keep showing a previously recorded rank for up to two daily updates while it checks whether a big drop persists. That means an old export can look different from the current tool.
Ask your vendor whether stored data for affected dates has been updated. If it has, compare the old export with the new export before sending anything to a client. Use Search Console as independent evidence: it shows the average position of your highest-ranking result, and a high average position does not by itself prove an incorrect rank exists in your tracker.
Source: Search Engine Journal
