Written by:

Matt Dias

Last updated 30 October 2026. This is a developing story and we’ll update this article as more information comes to light.

If your rank tracker has been telling you strange stories lately, you’re not imagining it. Since September 2026, Google appears to have been feeding some automated tools fake search results that look completely normal but list the wrong websites. The SEO world has dubbed them “poisoned SERPs”. The likely target is AI companies scraping Google’s results, with rank trackers caught in the crossfire. Here’s what’s going on and what it means for you.

What are poisoned SERPs?

A poisoned page looks exactly like a normal Google results page. There’s no error and no CAPTCHA, but most of the usual websites have been swapped for others, often social media profiles and forum threads. The websites are real, but the results are fake: they aren’t what Google normally ranks for that search.

Rank tracking platform Nozzle has published the most detailed research on the issue so far, in its Poisoned Google SERPs research. Of 27 million results pages checked since 13 September 2026, 8.4% came back poisoned, against 0.17% beforehand, peaking at 28.6% on 29 September. In one example, a search for “white label local seo” returned a steakhouse and several US government websites instead of SEO vendors.

The good news for UK businesses is that, across the whole period, the UK was the least affected of the 45 countries Nozzle mapped, at 3.6%, although its rate rose to between 5% and 8% on 17 and 18 October 2026. Some other platforms using different methods have reported lower rates than Nozzle.

Why would Google serve fake search results?

Google hasn’t commented publicly, but the industry consensus points to AI. AI tools rely on fresh information and some companies harvest Google’s results in bulk to feed their answers. Nozzle’s Derek Perkins told Search Engine Roundtable that Google seems to be blocking IP addresses, serving more CAPTCHAs and injecting bad data into results it suspects are being scraped.

That last tactic is the clever one. A blocked bot simply tries again, but a bot fed a convincing fake page stores it as real and moves on. Rather than slamming the door, Google keeps the bots busy collecting junk.

What it means for rank trackers

Rank trackers work by running automated searches, which to Google looks a lot like AI scraping. In Nozzle’s study, a tracked site dropped out of the top 10 on 60.2% of poisoned pages, against 2.7% normally. So a keyword that falls off a cliff and bounces back a day or two later is far more likely to be bad data than a real ranking change.

The big platforms are responding. Semrush says it has added extra checks and the impact on its users has been limited, while SE Ranking and AccuRanker have both rolled out fixes, with AccuRanker now automatically re-checking suspicious results.

What should you do about it?

Don’t panic. The evidence suggests real searchers still see normal results, so it’s the measurement that’s wobbling, not your rankings. As a Google Partner Agency, here’s what we’re advising our clients:

  • Trust Search Console first. If a keyword vanishes in your tracker but Search Console still shows impressions and clicks, nothing has happened to your site.
  • Look at trends, not single days. Most poisoned results clear within days, while real ranking changes stick.
  • Don’t react to one data point. Rewriting pages over a one-day dip could do more harm than good.

The cat and mouse game continues

If the industry is right about the motive, Google’s poisoned results show how seriously it’s protecting its data from AI competitors, and Nozzle’s latest figures suggest it isn’t over yet. The lesson for marketers is simple: treat third-party ranking data as a guide rather than gospel, and always sense-check it against Google’s own data.

If you’d like help making sense of your rankings or want an SEO strategy that also covers AI search optimisation, get in touch with our team.

Sources (for internal fact-checking, not for publishing)

Note: Nozzle’s figures changed in its 19 October update (8.0% became 8.4%, 49 countries became 52). Older coverage still quotes the original numbers, so the latest figures are used above. Google has made no public statement on the poisoned results.