Semrush Confirms Poisoned Google Results Are Hitting Rank Trackers

Semrush said on October 27 that some of the Google results its tools collect don’t match what a real searcher sees, which means part of your recent position data may be off.

Saw a sudden drop in the last two months? You can’t be sure your drop is real.

What Semrush said

Semrush calls these pages poisoned SERPs. Its update on poisoned SERPs describes two kinds of bad result pages:

• Whole result pages that are plainly wrong, with unrelated sites even on page one
• Pages where the top results look fine but lower spots fill with loosely related pages

Its example: a search in Brazil for a baby stroller model returned a dental supply page, because both used the Portuguese word “carrinho.”

What is Semrush doing about it? It flags suspect results and collects them again. It also drops clearly broken pages during collection and has adjusted its data sources.

It gave no count, though.

Ahrefs and others see poisoned SERPs too

Semrush isn’t alone. Sistrix, DataForSEO, SE Ranking and AccuRanker all posted notes, per Search Engine Roundtable’s running coverage.

Figures differ widely between vendors:

• Nozzle: about 8% of results pages it checked, since September
• Ahrefs said on October 22 that 5% to 20% of results were affected, depending on the data provider
• SE Ranking said on October 16 that about 2% of tracked results were still affected

Meanwhile, Ahrefs is cleaning up its past results, according to PPC Land’s report on the Ahrefs statement.

Why would Google do this? So far it has said nothing on the record.

The industry theory, which Semrush repeats but doesn’t confirm: Google is fighting large-scale scraping for AI, and your tools got caught in the net.

Why it matters

For many agencies, I’d guess the rankings report is the first thing a client reads each month. If even 8% of it is wrong, some of your reports since September are wrong too.

Still, Search Console is Google’s first-party data, though it is not a direct replica of a rank tracker.

So before you act on any drop in your position data, do this:

1. See if the drop holds across several days of collection.
2. Check Search Console’s clicks and impressions for the same dates.
3. Look at organic traffic to your landing page in your analytics.
4. If the numbers disagree, send the domain and keywords to your tool’s support team.

That said, I’d hold off on rewriting your pages, cutting links or changing titles because of one bad week in a third-party tool. That’s how you break a page that was fine.

Does your client ask why a keyword disappeared from the dashboard? Show them clicks and impressions in Search Console first.

Then talk rankings.

Common Questions

What are poisoned SERPs in Google rank tracking?

Poisoned SERPs are Google result pages served to automated rank trackers that differ from what a real user sees. Semrush says it has seen the issue since late summer, and Ahrefs says it has seen it over the past few weeks. A sudden drop in your rank tracking data should be checked against clicks and impressions in Search Console before you change anything.

Is Google Search Console data affected by poisoned SERPs?

The sources don’t report poisoning in Search Console itself. It is Google’s first-party data, which is why Semrush suggests checking unexpected ranking changes against it, but it covers only verified sites and does not resolve the problem.

Has Google confirmed it is sending fake results to SEO tools?

Google hasn’t commented publicly. The usual theory in the SEO industry is that Google is limiting large-scale scraping, including scraping for AI systems, and that the rank tracking tools you use every day are getting caught by the same filters.