A rank tracker logged Google pages missing their usual sites, some ChatGPT links lost tracking tags, and Google and Bing changed AI search links and data.

Welcome to the Pulse: This week, we’re looking at how much you can rely on your rankings and ChatGPT referral numbers, how Google and Bing display links and citations in AI search, and what Google is hiring for in Discover.

From Sept. 13 to Oct. 9, 8.0% of the Google results pages that rank-tracking company Nozzle could check against each keyword’s history were missing most of the keyword’s usual sites, which then came back on a later check, according to the company’s analysis. Nozzle collected those 17.8 million pages through automated searches.

That compares with 0.17% from Aug. 20 to Sept. 9. The share peaked at about a quarter of pages from Sept. 27 to 29 and has run at about 5% to 11% a day since Oct. 1. Nozzle describes these pages as “poisoned” and attributes the pattern to Google’s response to AI scraping. The report also doesn’t include a statement from Google. For keywords where a customer’s own site would typically rank, that site didn’t appear in the top 10 on 58.6% of affected pages, compared with 2.7% in the baseline.

Before adding a one-day drop from late September or October to a client report, compare the keyword with the sites that usually ranked on page 1 before mid-September (the baseline Nozzle uses). If Search Console shows a similar drop in impressions and clicks for the same query and page, the decline is more likely to be real.

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