Disclaimer: no AI was used in the creation of this blog.
As a digital marketer, my clients want to rank at the top of Google. (Seems fairly obvious, right?)
So, what is the simplest way to check if we have achieved that goal? Well, first we need to know what that actually means. Which keyword(s) does the client care about? What geographic area(s) do they need to rank in? Are we checking their local pack rankings and organic rankings, or just one of them?
Once we know all that, we can go to google dot com and type in the first keyword and see if the client’s website appears on the first page of Google (in the first 10 results), and if we don’t find it, then we have to click on page 2 and check results 11 through 20, and if we still don’t find it, we go to page 3 and check results 21 through 30, and so on and so forth until (hopefully) we find what position the client is ranking (counting manually to find the exact position). From there, we can enter the number into a spreadsheet and repeat the process until we are done.
But, what if we need to check a city where we aren’t located? Then we need to “spoof” our “geolocation” using something like the Spoof Geolocation Chrome Extension at https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/spoof-geolocation/ihdobppgelceaoeojmhpmbnaljhhmhlc to emulate browser results from somewhere else. Once you monkey around with the tool enough you will be able to get it working and finally figure out the true ranking for your client websites in all of the geolocations that are required.
That doesn’t even include the local pack (aka, the “Map Pack”). If you have a keyword that triggers a Map Pack it will typically show 3 businesses in it and then hide all of the other businesses that are relevant to your search behind a “View More Businesses” button. If your client website is not in the top 3 you will have to click that each time and count where the business appears manually, just like you had to do for the organic results on the main SERP, except in here there are 20 businesses per page (instead of 10), so it’s ever so slightly easier to collect your ranking here, but you still need to check many different pages if you are ranking poorly (or not included at all, because then you search dozens of pages and never find what you are looking for).
If you have to search for the ranking positions of dozens or hundreds of keywords across dozens or hundreds of geolocations while remembering to check both the local pack and organic rankings for all of them this can quickly become a massive task, taking hours or days to complete. Then, by the time you are done with the first task the data is already out of date and it’s time to do it all over again.
It used to be slightly easier to do this in the past, because Google used to allow you to have 100 results per page instead of just 10, but they eliminated that option in September 2025 for reasons I will get into below, but regardless, checking rankings manually has always been a difficult task.
This is exactly why tools like Moz, SEMRush, Ahrefs, BrightLocal and so many others were created. These “rank tracker” tools automate checking Google SERPs for you and make the data look polished and presentable. Clients and agencies alike can see evidence that marketing is working.
For decades these tools have been visiting SERPs trillions of times, scraping data and Google has been largely silent on it…until last month when they declared all out war against them.
Some of the earliest rumblings of trouble ahead began in April 2025 when reports emerged (https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-search-will-soon-ditch-country-specific-domains) that Google would soon be eliminating foreign language versions of Google (such as google dot co dot uk) and consolidating all of their traffic into the primary Google dot com, traditionally only used by the United States population. This meant that there would no longer be dozens of information sources for the ranking tools to source from, but just a single source of information that Google could now control with greater precision going forward.
In September 2025 (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-drops-100-results-parameter-40097.html), as previously mentioned, Google killed the ability to have 100 results per page, forcing all users to see only 10 results per page maximum. In that same month (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-is-hiring-an-anti-scraping-engineering-analyst/556262/) Google also put out a job ad looking for an Anti-Scraping Engineering Analyst.
In July of 2026 (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-com-goto-as-tracking-urls-41647.html) Google began to experiment with no longer showing the final destination URL of links on the SERPs and instead replacing them with “middle man” redirect links that looked like google dot com / goto ?url = 123abc. This made it so that search ranking tools and LLM tools like chatGPT could no longer connect page URLs to their rankings and LLMs could no longer deliver correct URLs when they scraped Google for queries, breaking many things for many people. This has led to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic now making their own index of the internet to get around Google’s new information embargo.
Around September 13, 2026 (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-blocking-scrapers-and-tracking-tools-42118.html) things heated up further when SEO ranking tool makers began to report difficulties in retrieving data from Google, with up to 80% less data being able to be scraped.
Even more shocking than that, on October 10, 2026 (https://nozzle.io/research/poisoned-google-serps/) Derek Perkins at Nozzio dot io noticed that since September 2026 Google had been feeding fake data to search ranking tools. Rather than just blocking all scrapers across the board, Google has decided to show false information on SERPs when they think its a robot on the page. This has been labelled “poisoning” the SERP. Sun Tzu said that all warfare is based on deception.
2 weeks ago, October 12, 2026 (https://www.seroundtable.com/third-party-google-rank-tracking-broken-42272.html) it was reported Google had become even more effective at blocking SEO ranking tools, leaving almost all scraping tools on life support with the expectation being that Google will find a way to permanently kill them all off soon, ending an industry.
Just today SEMRush posted an update (https://www.semrush.com/blog/poisoned-serps/) about the poisoned Google SERPs issue that makes it clear that Google has not yet won the war against the scrapers.
Another interesting thing I see in SEMRush’s article from today is that it seems the Search Engine Ranking Tracking Tool Industry (the SERTTI as I am now calling it) believes that Google solely wants to prevent AI tools from scraping their SERPs and their tools are just getting lumped in like the baby with the bathwater. I disagree and think that Google wants both the AI tools and the SERTTI folks to stop scraping their SERPs, leaving digital marketing folks like myself to go back to checking keywords by hand as I described at the beginning of this article.
It’s interesting that Google’s own CEO predicts a future where most of the internet is robots, which he describes as “agents doing the searching for you”. One must wonder why Google is working so hard to stop robots from visiting their website when that is the very future they are working to build right now for all of us.
And let’s say that Google wins the war… All of the ranking tools disappear, so that’s a small win for the G, but all of the LLM tools will already have built their own index and search engines eating more and more of Google’s market share, relegating them to the status of that awkward and annoying cousin that you are forced to see once every 4 years at the Oval Office for your tech bro family reunion/inauguration party. I think Google will lose their crown very quickly if another competitor’s search engine actually drives traffic to websites at a rate like Google does, but right now that is not even close to the case, with 8 days ago Danny Goodwin reporting that ChatGPT delivers less than 1% of the web traffic that Google does (https://searchengineland.com/chatgpt-sends-less-than-googles-traffic-497705).
Clients are going to have to rely more on Google Search Console ranking data going forward and accept that more precise data beyond that is very costly to acquire because it has to be checked by hand. Digital marketing professionals are going to have to accept that very soon Google won’t be the only show in town. You are going to have to have websites ranking well on Google, Bing, OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Muse and potentially dozens of other search engines that will all be competing for the most eyeballs over the next 20 years.