Google made a significant change to its system last month that caused many popular SEO ranking and data tracking tools to stop reporting data for a short time. The change was designed to block automated screen scrapers and APIs accessing the search results.
Subsequently, users of SEO tools including SimilarWeb, Rank Ranger, SE Ranking, ZipTie.dev, AlsoAsked and possibly others reported data lags. However, other SEO tools were unaffected, such as Semrush, Sistrix, Monitorank, and Ahrefs, but search marketers are still urged to check which of their tools may still be impacted.
Fortunately the change was just a temporary situation from January 15th-20th, as numerous SEO managers rely on those tools to understand whether their SEO efforts are successful (i.e. if their goals are helping to drive visibility, conversions and revenue for their brands and websites). Without this data, they can be working more in the dark, so it was a significant concern for many.
This wasn’t an attack by Google on keyword tools, but more likely Large Language Models as it doesn’t want LLMs accessing and ‘scraping’ their search results or their AI Overviews (and which queries trigger them). Keyword tracking tools are just collateral damage.
Google later revealed that it was now forcing users to turn on JavaScript to use Search. Google said that “enabling JavaScript allows us to better protect our services and users from bots and evolving forms of abuse and spam, and to provide the most relevant and up-to-date information.” They also reported that “fewer than .1%” of searches on Google are done by people who disable JavaScript.
However, by making this change they were making their data more difficult to access at scale, Google are protecting themselves against LLMs training their data sets based on Google’s data and in the long term, it’s hoping that it will just make the task more expensive and therefore less viable because LLMs like ChatGPT are becoming seen as an adequate/better replacement to Google search. That has caused Google’s global market share to drop below 90% for the first time since 2015, which is a significant concern for it.
If you want to know how this change may impact your business’s SEO performance, please get in touch.