Google accused of poisoning SERPs: 25% of results fake at peak, Nozzle's 27.5M-SERP analysis shows
daluoseo · x · 2026-10-23
Google reportedly poisoning search results for third-party tools and AI scrapers
The author traced mysterious client ranking drops to corrupted SERP data from Ahrefs and DataForSEO, then found Nozzle's analysis of 27.5M SERPs across 49 countries:
- Sept 13: mass failures on Google requests
- Sept 20: "poisoned" pages appear in results
- Sept 27-29: peak, 25% of results fake
- October: 5-11% still wrong daily
The fake pages are indistinguishable from real ones—no errors or captchas—just with top-ranking sites (only 20% remain) replaced by Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn and Quora results, which tools then store as genuine ranking data.
The author links this to Google killing num=100, rolling out goto links, and suing SerpApi: a systematic effort to protect search data, aimed at companies feeding Google results to AI, with SEO tools as collateral damage.
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