Google is slamming the door on SERP tracking, but AI agents may be giving it more reason to shut down automated queries.

Google is entering a new phase of SERP scraping due to AI agents. Some of it may be driven by networks of LLMs that are reverse engineering Google’s search results. The public face of Google’s war against scraping remains rank trackers but the real battle may be elsewhere.

Will the ability to track rankings become a thing of the past?

What may be a reason behind Google’s actions to stop rank tracking is that the amount of AI Agent traffic has grown exponentially. According to Cloudflare, which is in a position to monitor web traffic, AI agent website traffic has increased 1,700% over the past year.

“At the end of 2024, Cloudflare handled an average of 63 million HTTP requests a second. Today, it’s almost doubled to 115 million, with peaks above 150 million. Over the past year, daily requests from AI agents on our network grew by more than 1,700%. This year, for the first time, more than half of Internet traffic wasn’t human.”

The problem with AI agent web traffic is that some of it a hybrid human/agent visit, agents working on behalf of humans, which means that some of it still has value to websites, something Google may have already considered in formulating engineering responses to rank trackers.

The problem for Google is that a massive amount of traffic could cause latency issues in serving search results, including AI search results.

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