Google’s anti-scraping response is poisoning rank-tracking data, Nozzle finds
A 27.5-million-page study finds anti-bot responses can look like genuine ranking changes inside commercial search datasets.
Nozzle analysed 27.5 million search-result pages and says Google began returning normal-looking but substituted results after requests started failing in response to AI scraping. It classified 8.0% of pages since September 13 as poisoned, against 0.17% in its baseline, while tracked sites disappeared from the top ten on 58.6% of poisoned pages and 77.9% of usual result sets returned within three days. Because the bad pages look valid and are stored as real results, Google’s crawler controls can turn into false customer reporting and costly quality checks for search-intelligence providers.