According to a new report from Nozzle, a search engine results page (SERP) monitoring firm, Google may be deliberately manipulating search results that are visible to rank-tracking tools and other automated services.

SERPs are the pages Google displays in response to a search query. Companies often pay service providers like Nozzle to monitor these results and track how their websites rank for targeted keywords.

While monitoring Google SERPs, Nozzle discovered evidence that the search giant appeared to be deliberately poisoning results pages accessed by rank trackers. Google has little apparent reason to serve misleading data specifically to these tools, suggesting that legitimate SEO services may be caught in the crossfire of Google's efforts to disrupt data scraping by AI bots.

For its report, Nozzle analyzed 27.5 million SERPs and found that more than 660,000 keywords were associated with poisoned results pages. According to the report, approximately 8 percent of SERPs were poisoned. The altered results appeared in both desktop and mobile versions of Google Search.

What does a poisoned SERP look like? According to Nozzle, it looks much like a normal search results page. However, links that typically rank well in legitimate results may be replaced with less relevant or less accurate results, often from social media platforms.

Google has been battling third-party AI scrapers for some time. These automated bots collect Google's search data, potentially to power competing AI services or reverse-engineer the company's search algorithms. By poisoning search results, Google could undermine the value of the data collected by these bots.

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