Why Google is taking aggressive action on SERP data collection and what to do about it

Transcript

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 I also said rank tracking is obsolete in 2023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