Rank tracking is mostly fixed after a week of fake drops
The fake ranking crashes of the past week were a data problem, and most of it has now been repaired.
Rank tracking tools are largely working again after a week in which keywords looked like they had crashed overnight. SE Ranking says it has corrected ranking data for all affected dates and that rank checks are running normally for the vast majority of keywords. About 2% of its tracked results are still affected, and the company says that share keeps shrinking.
The cause was not a ranking change. As we covered earlier, Google has been serving fake search results to automated scrapers, the software rank trackers use to check where you sit in search. SE Ranking put it plainly, saying Google has been returning incomplete or unreliable results to rank trackers across the industry, which can make keywords show false drops or appear as not ranking even when their real positions have not moved.
How big the problem was
Brodie Clark pointed to a study from Nozzle that looked at 27.5 million search results pages across 49 countries. It found 8% of them were poisoned after September 13, peaking around 27% between September 27 and 29. On poisoned pages, organic results kept only about 21% of their usual sites, compared with 88% normally, and tracked client sites fell out of the top 10 on 58.6% of them. Social sites like Reddit, Facebook and LinkedIn surged to fill the gaps.
Cyrus SEO, who flagged the research, said the fake results look real but carry garbage data, and that this hits AI crawlers, scrapers and rank trackers alike.
What to do if a report still looks wrong
If a ranking report shows a big overnight decline, check Google Search Console first. Search Console is Google's own free tool, and its average position number comes straight from Google rather than from a scraper. Open the Performance report, look at average position for the keyword, and compare it with the date your tracker says you dropped. If Search Console has not moved much, the drop almost certainly did not happen.
SE Ranking has published a status page with troubleshooting steps and asks customers to flag results that still look wrong, since that feedback helps the team find and correct them. Mordy Oberstein said the team has fixed the unreliable results being served to trackers across the board.
For a small business owner, the takeaway is simple. Do not change anything on your site because of a drop that only shows in a tracker. Confirm it in Search Console first.
If your client's ranking report shows a significant decline overnight, check GSC average position first.
This can cause keywords to show false drops or appear as not ranking, even when their actual positions haven’t changed.
Be the person who already knew
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