Google may be poisoning search results to deter AI scraping, while rank trackers and the websites they monitor get misleading data.

A new analysis from enterprise rank-tracking firm Nozzle claims that Google is showing misleading search results pages (SERPs) to rank trackers and AI companies in an apparent effort to poison the data they are attempting to collect.

Nozzle explains that the non-standard search engine results pages (SERPs) began showing up on September 20th and reached as high as 25% of the search results and since October 1st have comprised between 5 to 11% of the results per day.

That sequence of dates is why they characterize these kinds of search results as poisoned:

“That sequence is why we call it poisoning. Google is not refusing these requests; it answers them with a complete page whose results are wrong, and nothing on the page says so.

A refused request tells a scraper to try again, while a poisoned one gets stored as real. It is Google’s response to AI scraping and grounding, the bulk collection of its results to feed AI answers, and rank trackers, which collect SERPs the same way, are caught in it.”

Their opinion then is that SERP poisoning is happening in order to thwart AI companies that rely on Google’s Search Results from LLMs that use it to ground their answers and to confound rank trackers.

Although Nozzle did not mention it, in my opinion it may also be a way to confound spammers who are trying to distill Google’s search results answers and reverse engineer how pages are ranked.

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