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Why Google is taking aggressive
action on SERP data collection
and what to do about it
Ray Grieselhuber
@raygrieselhuber
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The rank trackers are dead!
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Sound familiar?
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Google makes some changes, everything is dead
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I also said rank tracking is obsolete in 2023
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Why would I say this?
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Rank Tracking → SERP Analytics
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Semantics?
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How many reports still look like this?
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SERPs have a shape and features that influence human behavior
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(We’ll talk about agent behavior at the end)
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SERP data belongs to all of us
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If there is data ABOUT you or data that AFFECTS
you…it is YOUR data
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Paid for by ads targeted to us (using our data)
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SERP data is the most valuable and underrated
source of behavioral data on the planet
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It is both a reflection and influencer of human behavior
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Google is taking aggressive action to prevent the
collection of data that belongs to us
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A timeline:
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Why are they being so aggressive?
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The threat from AI companies
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The index is the prize
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The generated AI answers are also valuable
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The agent-driven future is an existential threat to their
current ad business
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They don’t care about companies in our space
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January 2025:
SERPpocalypse
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September 2025:
Num=100 Removal
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December 2025:
SerpApi Lawsuit
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May 2026:
“Drop and Pops”
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July 2026:
NetNut Takedown
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August 2026:
Goto Links
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September 2026:
The Banhammer, followed by an eerie silence…
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October 2026:
Poisoned SERPs
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October 2026:
Goto Links, Part Deux
Olivier de Segonzac: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7521955412418580481/
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Other weirdness:
Made up subdomains in search results
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There are always countermeasures
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Our response
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Focus on top of the SERP (2-3 pages)
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Real-time poisoning detection
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Data labeling
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Observability
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Second-order observations on first-order data
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The key question now is:
How confident are you in this data?
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A simple answer does not suffice
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Accuracy is the wrong goal in longitudinal monitoring
Mike King
https://ipullrank.com/accuracy-vs-precision
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You’re looking for patterns across a long range of samples
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Removing deliberate sabotage such as poisoning is critical
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The question is not: how confident are you in the data?
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The question is:
what does your data pipeline do in order capture samples
reliably and eliminate and / or label anomalies?
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Clearly label outages and errors
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Send regular updates to stakeholders
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Trusting the data is about trusting the process
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Increased collaboration among providers is a positive
outcome
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The SERP of the (near) future
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More generative features
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Extensible
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/connected-apps-one-place/
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Multi-turn
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Very interactive
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Maybe programmatic
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The key question:
What does Google’s ad model look like when the majority of SERP traffic is agentic?
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It’s coming
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The transition to local agent harnesses makes it much
more difficult to block bots
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These agents are acting on behalf of humans and
sometimes using their hardware
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Rankings don’t matter but SERP Features do
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Ad-blindness is built in
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Open source harnesses + open weight models are key
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Stay on top of the releases in AI models, especially the open ones
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Takeaways:
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Join us at FOUND Tokyo 2027
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Thank you! (+ link to slides)
https://raygrieselhuber.com