Rank trackers show fake Google results right now, and Edward Sturm calls it "probably the most important thing in SEO right now." He covered it on his show in his episode on fake rankings in SEO tools: why the tools are wrong, whether they will recover, and what to trust in the meantime.
What SEOs are seeing
Sturm describes it this way. You open one of the big SEO tools and it says you lost all your rankings. "Line just goes right down." Then you check Google Search Console and nothing is wrong. Your rankings are where they have always been, maybe higher, and you get as much traffic as before.
A tool might show the results page for your own brand name with your site nowhere on page one, and the page filled with sites from "a completely different niche." In Search Console, you still rank number one for your name.
He says he has seen it himself and gets several emails and messages a day about it. One of the top SEO tools put a notice at the top of its platform saying it is seeing changes in how Google serves search results, which may cause inconsistencies in some data. Sturm says most tools have not been that open. People doing their own SEO are confused, and agencies have to explain to clients why a platform says every ranking is gone.
Why Google is doing this
Sturm's explanation: after Google's copyright case against a search scraping company was dismissed in July, Google had to find another way to stop AI companies from scraping its results. He says AI companies used scraped Google results to check their own search systems against Google's and to improve their answers. Google sees those companies as competitors. So it added technical measures, and SEO tools became "collateral damage."
The measures he lists:
- Wide IP blocking aimed at the proxy networks rank trackers scrape through.
- A redirect on result links. Hover over a link in Google and you now see a /goto address instead of the page itself. He says this gives Google another place to apply captchas, tokens and session checks.
- Many more captchas. His example: a session that clicks 80 of those links in 2 seconds with no mouse movement looks like a bot.
- Fake results. He calls this the most damaging one. "The tools aren't failing outright." They get back results that look normal, because Google gave them the wrong results.
News reports put numbers on it. Search Engine Roundtable (Barry Schwartz, October 12, 2026) dated the start of the blocking to around September 13. PPC Land reported on October 19 that one rank tracking company measured swapped results on about 8% of the pages it checked. On 58.6% of those pages, the tracked site dropped out of the top 10.
Will the tools work again?
Sturm says he is optimistic. His reasons:
- Google already shares its results with partners. He calls it search syndication and names Ecosia, a search engine that has shown Google's results and ads to many of its users since 2023 through a deal with Google.
- According to Barry Schwartz, Google already has a private API for some select partners. It is hard to get into and probably expensive, but it exists.
- Google gave SEOs a search API before. It launched in 2002 and SEOs used it for years to track rankings. Google stopped handing out new keys in 2006 and shut it down in 2009.
- In 2025, in the Justice Department antitrust case, the judge required Google to give syndicated results and ads to "qualified competitors." Google is appealing. Sturm says it could start late this year or early next year.
His point: a system is being built to vet companies and license them Google's results. "If competitors can be vetted, rank trackers could be too."
He also sees the tools improving. Three weeks before the episode, one major tool showed a completely wrong results page for the name of his own course. A week or two before the episode, it was fixed. He mentions a press release from one rank tracker claiming it restored full top 100 tracking as of October 1. He says he has not tested it, it is not an endorsement, and "SEO companies lie all the time."
What Sturm says to do now
His biggest point: use Google Search Console as the source of truth for your own positions. In his words, it is "Google literally giving you their data about how your website appears in Google Search." He adds that Search Console only keeps 16 months of data, so save it yourself if you want the history.
He gives an example of how to use it. You might see a high-intent search where you sit at position nine and still get a lot of clicks. Then you notice the page ranking for it is mostly unrelated to the search, and you have no page made for it. He calls that a great opportunity: make a page for that search.
The rest of his list:
- If a results page in a tool does not make sense, check it yourself in Google.
- Keep focusing on relevance. He says searches targeted properly still land on page one, especially on sites with good history that are building authority.
- Search volume numbers in the tools are unaffected. He says they mostly come from Google's Keyword Planner plus bought, anonymized browser data.
He also sees an upside. Big companies may be slower to adapt, and competitors who trust their tools less may panic. "So actually this could make SEO less competitive." He quotes Warren Buffett from 1979: "Uncertainty actually is the friend of the buyer of long-term values." In SEO, he says, those values are relevance, authority and meeting the searcher's need before they start scrolling.
His last word on drops: if a tool shows crazy drops, there is a good chance Search Console won't, "unless, you know, the drops are real and you've been doing SEO wrong."
What this means for a business owner
If you get a monthly SEO report with a ranking chart, it may show drops that did not happen. Before anything gets changed on your site, ask whoever sent it two questions:
- Where do these ranking numbers come from?
- Does Search Console show the same drop for the same searches and the same weeks?
A quick check you can do yourself: search your business name in Google. If you are at the top and a report says you are off page one, the report is likely wrong.
Search Console is free from Google. If you don't have it, ask whoever built your site to set it up.
How we use this at eezyRank
For clients with Google Boost turned on, the work starts from that client's Search Console. It picks the searches to work on from there and measures the before and after there too. When a page already shows for a search but sits lower down, it can get a section aimed at that search. When no page covers a search, it can become an idea for a new page. None of that depends on a rank tracker, so the fake results do not touch it.
Some of our other reports do read Google's public results, the same way rank trackers do. Town Rankings is one of them. Those can be hit like any other tool, so we treat a sudden drop there the way Sturm says to: Search Console is the truth.
To see what eezyRank builds for local businesses, visit https://eezyrank.com.
