Google's campaign against automated access to its search results appears to be creating a new problem for the SEO industry: some of the dashboards used to diagnose ranking changes may temporarily be measuring the limitations of their own collection systems as much as Google's rankings themselves. Nozzle says the amount of Google data it has been able to retrieve fell by roughly 80%, SISTRIX has publicly acknowledged reduced collection rates, and independent comparisons are showing meaningful differences between major SEO platforms.
The latest evidence was assembled by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable on September 18. Derek Perkins of Nozzle told Schwartz that most of his tools' attempts to collect Google Search data were being blocked and that he had seen an approximately 80% reduction in the data he could obtain. Perkins also reported seeing a similar effect with DataForSEO. The figure is important, but it needs to be interpreted correctly: it describes a reduction in data collection, not an 80% fall in websites' rankings, traffic or Google visibility.
SISTRIX confirms that Google's changes are slowing collection
SISTRIX provides direct vendor confirmation that something has changed. On September 16, its official status page reported that Google had made further changes to the way search results are delivered and that SISTRIX data collection was consequently running at a reduced rate. The company said it was adapting its processes while continuing to update the Toolbox.
This is not an isolated event. SISTRIX's status history describes a continuing technical contest between Google and companies that collect search results at scale. In August, the provider documented Google's broader rollout of redirect URLs that conceal the destination URL until an additional request is made. In September 2025, Google's removal of support for the num=100 parameter forced rank-tracking providers to change how they collected deeper search positions. SISTRIX says Google has been making search-result collection harder for roughly a year, with changes arriving at a particularly high pace now.
Ahrefs, Semrush and SISTRIX are not necessarily seeing the same Google
The most consequential part of the current disruption is not simply slower collection. It is that different tools may temporarily tell different stories about the same site. SEO consultant Glenn Gabe compared third-party data for a site whose real traffic behavior he could independently validate around Google's September 4 volatility. According to the comparison reported by Search Engine Roundtable, Ahrefs detected the site's recovery, Semrush also reflected the recovery but with some delay, while SISTRIX had not yet captured it.
That single comparison is not enough to establish a universal accuracy ranking among the platforms. Collection performance can vary by market, keyword set, device, timing and the technical countermeasures each provider deploys. It does, however, demonstrate the immediate analytical risk: when Google changes how automated systems can retrieve SERPs, two reputable SEO tools can temporarily produce materially different representations of the same ranking event.
Your SEO sensor may be measuring the scraper problem
This matters especially during periods of apparent Google volatility. SEOs routinely use visibility indexes, ranking trackers and third-party keyword databases to determine whether a site-specific movement is part of a broader algorithmic event. Those systems depend on collecting enormous quantities of Google results. If collection becomes slower, shallower or incomplete, a chart can show missing rankings, delayed recoveries or unusually muted movement even when the underlying website performance has already changed.
SISTRIX has previously documented exactly this type of measurement problem. Its guidance on reduced Top 100 keyword depth explains that Google's changes made deeper result collection increasingly difficult and recommends checking Google Search Console when there is uncertainty about whether a ranking decline is real. The distinction is fundamental: an actual search-performance loss should eventually appear in first-party clicks and impressions, while a collection artifact can exist only inside the third-party dataset.
Google has not reported a Search outage
There is also no indication that the current issue is a conventional Google Search service outage. Google's official Search Status Dashboard currently reports no incidents across crawling, indexing, ranking or serving. The disruption being discussed concerns automated third-party retrieval of Google results, not Google's ability to serve those results to ordinary search users.
That distinction helps explain why a rank tracker can struggle while Search itself appears normal. Google can deliver results successfully to human users while simultaneously making high-volume automated collection more difficult through redirects, verification mechanisms, delivery changes and other anti-automation techniques. From Google's perspective those are different systems and different operational questions; from an SEO data provider's perspective, however, every additional obstacle increases the cost and complexity of recreating the SERP at scale.
Do not treat one third-party chart as ground truth right now
For SEO teams, the immediate response should be methodological rather than alarmist. A dramatic visibility drop in one external tool should not automatically be interpreted as a ranking collapse, particularly if the site's Google Search Console data, analytics and business traffic do not support the same conclusion. Cross-checking multiple sources becomes more important when collection pipelines are known to be under pressure.
First-party data should carry particular weight for a site's own performance. Search Console does not answer every competitive-intelligence question that Ahrefs, Semrush, SISTRIX, Nozzle and other platforms can answer, but it provides a direct Google-side view of clicks, impressions, average position and query/page performance for the verified property. Server logs and analytics can add further evidence. For competitor research, where first-party data is unavailable, analysts may need to accept greater uncertainty and look for agreement across multiple independent datasets.
Timing matters too. A provider that is temporarily collecting more slowly can eventually catch up, turning what looked like a missing recovery into a delayed one. That makes same-day comparisons particularly vulnerable. Analysts documenting Google updates should record when a third-party dataset was refreshed rather than assuming every platform's chart represents the same observation window.
The economics of rank tracking are changing
Behind the short-term disruption is a larger structural issue. Google has progressively made large-scale SERP extraction more expensive. The disappearance of num=100, masked destination URLs and repeated changes to result delivery can multiply the number of requests and processing steps required to reconstruct rankings. Providers can adapt — and historically they have — but every adaptation consumes infrastructure, engineering effort and money.
That can influence not only update speed but also which data is economical to collect. SISTRIX, for example, has previously said it prioritizes ranking depth according to search volume and relevance for some keyword segments while continuing deeper tracking for core metrics and project keywords. As Google's defenses evolve, the industry may increasingly have to make trade-offs between breadth, depth, freshness and collection cost.
For now, the strongest conclusion is narrower than the headline battle metaphor suggests. Google appears to have made automated SERP collection significantly harder again, and named providers are reporting measurable effects. The tools are already adapting, so this may not remain a lasting degradation. But during the adjustment period, SEO professionals should treat sudden third-party ranking anomalies as signals to investigate, not facts to accept in isolation. When the sensors disagree, the first question is no longer only “What did Google change in the rankings?” It may also be “Which tools were actually able to see the rankings correctly?”