Your rank tracker may be showing a crash that never happened
Three well known SEOs reported wrong rank tracking data on the same day, with Ahrefs named most often.
Rank tracking tools (software that checks where your pages sit in Google for chosen search terms) are showing drops that are not real. JH Scherck posted that every site his team works with looked like it had tanked in Ahrefs, but manual spot checks found the rankings unchanged. Lily Ray said she saw a bunch of massive surges in the same tool the same day, and asked for annotations so users know when the data is off.
This follows the earlier reports of tracking tools serving stale numbers. What is new is that named SEOs are now pointing at specific tools and specific days, not a general slowdown.
What might be causing it
Charles Floate posted that Ahrefs, Semrush and all the rank trackers seemed to be bugging out badly compared with what he saw in the real search results. His guess is that Google is adding another anti-scraping measure after losing the SERPAPI court case. He described the tracked results pages filling up with user generated content or YouTube videos instead of the pages that actually rank.
Ahrefs, SEMRush and ALL the rank trackers seem to be bugging out BIG TIME right now vs. actual SERPs
That is one person's theory, not a confirmed cause. Floate also said he does not think spammers or hackers are behind it, and that he believes Google is protecting its own data. Neither Google nor Ahrefs has said anything about it in these sources.
What to do about it
If your tracker shows a sudden drop this week, do not act on it yet. Open a private browsing window, search two or three of your main terms yourself, and see where your page actually sits. If it is where it was, the drop is in the tool, not in Google.
The other free check is Google Search Console, which reports data straight from Google rather than from a scraper. Open it, click Performance, and look at clicks and impressions for the last 28 days. If that line is flat, your traffic did not fall, no matter what your paid tool says.
The wider point for small business owners is that third party rank numbers are an estimate. They are collected by software that loads Google search pages over and over, and Google has been making that harder. When a tool and Search Console disagree, believe Search Console.
Do not rebuild pages, cut content or change anything on your site because of a single bad week in a rank chart. Wait for the tool provider to confirm the data is clean, then compare.
Every site we work with has "tanked" in Ahrefs, but when we spot check, rankings are fine.
Yeah I saw a bunch of massive surges today too.