As of 16th January 2025 we are noticing lengthy delays on SEO rank tracking tools as a result of Google blocking search result scraping.
The issue is affecting many of the most popular SEO tools on the market.
SERP ranking tool outages appear to be a direct result of changes that were made to Google’s system that is now blocking access to scrapers and APIs that are used to gather SERP ranking data.
SEO tools that appear to be impacted by search result scraping block
- Semrush
- Seranking
- Ahrefs
- Serprobot
SE Ranking saw a temporary outage of all keywords tracking refreshes with the company seeming to resolve some of the issues by 18th January 2025. As of 19th January the Seranking currently has this message posted to customers:
“Select SERP features are still not available for tracking. Our team continues to work towards resolving this issue as soon as possible.”
While other rank tracking tools appear to show a significant decline in reported SERP fluctuations since the 11th of January.
It’s worth nothing that Semrush denies that they have been affected by any reporting issues. Despite this, as an SEO agency, we have had a number of clients reporting notable changes to their visibility report in Semrush. When compared to actual organic performance in Google Search Engine and Google Analytics, these changes are not corroborated.
SEO news outlet Search Engine Land who are owned by Semrush originally reported that Semrush was one of the tools affected by the outages but later retracted the claim after consulting with an internal spokesperson from Semrush.
Why is Google blocking scraping from third party SEO tools?
If we refer to Google’s “Spam policies for Google web search” document in Google Search Central, blocking of automated scraping of search results to check rankings and SERP features is not new.
“Machine-generated traffic (also called automated traffic) refers to the practice of sending automated queries to Google. This includes scraping results for rank-checking purposes or other types of automated access to Google Search conducted without express permission. Machine-generated traffic consumes resources and interferes with our ability to best serve users. Such activities violate our spam policies and the Google Terms of Service.”
Despite this statement from Google’s guidelines, we know that Google does in fact allow a number of companies to crawl and scrape search results for commercial gain (charging customers for rank tracking tools).
What now?
It is possible that Google may now be changing their policies and closing the loopholes that have previously allowed crawlers to scrape pages to report rankings through third party reporting tools.
As of January 19th, it looks as though ranking tools are back to reporting ranking information – albeit with some limitations on these functions. Without cross-checking hundreds of keywords, it’s difficult to get a sense of just how accurate the reporting is at this stage. We would suggest that this is a developing story that will be followed by official statements from SEO reporting tools in the coming days.
