Google appears to be blocking scrapers and rank trackers harder

Rank-tracking and third-party tracking tools that scrape Google Search results are reporting sharply reduced success since around September 13, 2026, according to Search Engine Roundtable. Nozzle, one of the affected vendors, said it saw about an 80 percent drop in the data it could get from Google. The pattern coincides with Google updates the site tracked on September 4, 12 and 15, though Google has not confirmed any change aimed at scrapers.

What vendors are reporting#

Nozzle’s Derek Perkins said the majority of his tool’s attempts to scrape data from Google Search have been blocked, putting the drop in data at around 80 percent. He said he saw the same with data from DataForSEO. Sistrix posted a status update saying “Google has made further changes to the way search results are delivered” and that its own data collection was running at a reduced rate as of September 16, 2026. Sistrix’s Steve Paine said Google has been changing how it delivers search results for about a year, currently at a very high pace.

Not every vendor reports the same hit. Neither Ahrefs nor Semrush reported a block. SEO consultant Glenn Gabe checked a site that dropped and fully recovered: Ahrefs picked up the recovery, Semrush showed it with a lag and Sistrix did not. He concluded Ahrefs and Semrush can still scrape, Semrush more slowly, a sign the blocking is not landing the same way across every tool.

How reliable is this signal#

Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz wrote that something may be off with the data scraping from these tools, that he suspects Google is winning, and that the tools might be wrong, so readers should be careful with their data. He had no confirmation from other tools yet, the source mentions none from Google, and the inconsistency between tools such as Ahrefs and Sistrix supports treating this as an observed pattern rather than a confirmed policy shift.

Why we care#

Rank trackers, AI search monitoring tools and other third-party scrapers are how much of the industry measures ranking movement and AI Overview presence when Google’s own tools do not cover the same ground. If access to Google Search keeps degrading for these tools, site owners lose a chunk of the visibility data they rely on day to day, and any tool-reported ranking swing needs more scrutiny about whether it reflects real movement or a scraping gap.