Anybody in SEO over the last few days will tell you that Google made some changes that took out the ability of most rank trackers to accurately collect data.
There appear to have been at least two waves of this, with the most recent one occurring last night, Eastern Standard Time, around 9pm.
Barry Schwartz was one of the first, if not the first, to cover this incident.
Impact for DemandSphere Customers
We were affected on the second wave, last night, and our team has been working nonstop on recovery since that point.
I am happy to report that we are currently back in business but keeping a close eye on this as we expect Google to continue to make changes.
We will be sending out emails to our customers, but we do expect a data loss for the last 14 hours or so, which will result in some delays. We apologize for this and want to assure our customers and partners that we are working around the clock to ensure stability.
Technical Details
On the technical side of things, basically all requests to Google were returning results that look something like this:

So, it wasn’t a blockage per se but more of a data pollution issue.
We also noticed that our focus on JS-enabled fetching helped us to avoid this issue for longer than we had seen in other solutions. JS-based fetching is more expensive than direct HTTP fetching, but we feel strongly that this is an important differentiator and we are continuing to expand it in everything we do.
While fetching and retrieving data has been restored, we are also noticing a much lower impression rate of AI Overviews. This is clearly something they don’t want indexing agents to have access to.
I wanted to share a few observations.
Earlier this week, we started to notice in our ChatGPT tracking data that organic results were starting to come from Google in addition to / instead of from Bing, in some cases. We were quite surprised by this and our speculation is that Google’s actions this week are related more to this than them worrying about rank trackers.
This does highlight the value of SERP data for many AI (and other use cases) and it’s one of the reasons that we believe that SERP data in general is one of the most undervalued data assets on the market today.
We will continue to share updates and insights as we have them.

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Considerations for customers of SERP tracking platforms
As far as we can tell after reviewing the various tools out there, most companies were affected, one way or another. Some are still working to recover and we know of one smaller company that has basically said they have no plans to recover. Over time, this issue will get worked out, as it always does. The main considerations for customers of this type of data should be:
- How quickly can your vendor recover?
- How proactive are they in their communication?
- Are they making use of the latest fetching and scraping techniques, especially with a focus on using JavaScript and browsers for data capture?
These three areas represent a major area of focus for us at DemandSphere.
We recognize the struggle that this represents for everyone in the community and wish everyone the best in their recovery efforts.
Our industry is getting better about sharing data and anecdotes, which helps everyone to align incentives on providing the best solutions for this valuable data.