Since the end of March 2026, many SEO professionals have observed aberrant data in their rank-tracking tools: massive, unexplained spikes in exposure for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram or Dailymotion on queries where those platforms objectively have no place. Some analysts, misled by those figures, believed in an unprecedented algorithmic quake. The reality is crueller: Google was simply not showing them the real results.
The “Google soup”: fake results to feed SEO tools
The mechanism is now documented. When Google identifies automated behavior (high query volume, suspicious user-agent, absence of JavaScript execution, recognized scraping patterns), it serves degraded or biased results, with an overrepresentation of YouTube or Dailymotion videos, even on queries where they shouldn’t dominate.
This is not a bug. It is a deliberate decision Rather than blocking bots outright, Google serves them disinformation. At Monitorank, this soup was detected, documented and a fix was issued.
February 2026: Monitorank detects and fixes the issue within hours
On February 3, 2026, at 6 a.m., Monitorank account metrics plunged sharplyThe technical teams immediately got to work. The diagnosis came quickly: Google was massively sending YouTube and Dailymotion results to the robots it identified, particularly on pages 2 and 3 of the SERPs.
As Fabien Barry noted that morning on X: "Pages 2 and 3 return many YouTube and Dailymotion results. Maybe a change at Google: when it detects a bot, instead of blacklisting it, it provides unreliable data (like Bing)."
Google update since last night. Nothing certain, I have to continue my tests.
Pages 2 and 3 return many YouTube and Dailymotion results.
Maybe a change for Google: when it detects a bot, instead of blacklisting it, it provides unreliable data (like Bing).
— Fabien (@barryfabien) February 3, 2026
A few hours later, an initial fix is deployedThe same day, the situation was under control! On February 4, Google backtracked. Was it a test?
March 2026: Google returns to the charge, in a tense context
On March 24, 2026, Google launches a Flash Spam Update, deployed and completed within a few hours. Shortly after, on March 27, the Mountain View giant announces the March Core Update, its first of the year, with a rollout planned over two weeks.
It is precisely during this turbulent window that Google returns in force. For Monitorank, the trigger is technical: following thea March 24 Spam Update that massively blacklists its SEO bots, it urgently set up a second backup infrastructure. By accident, this infrastructure did not have the patch deployed in February. The next morning, March 25, 2026, the metrics plunged again. The false results are back: YouTube, Dailymotion, but also Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. Around 25% of the tool's users' rankings were temporarily incorrect. The fix is applied during the day, and the affected keywords are relaunched.
Google traps bots by providing SERPs with fake results.
We were the first to notice it; a fix was deployed.
Google came back at it this week, everything is under control for @monitorank and @semscraper
https://t.co/esR8PAJXIl
— Fabien (@barryfabien) March 27, 2026
Industry confusion: a historic Core Update… or false data?
This is where the situation becomes particularly interesting, but also worrying for the SEO ecosystem.
In March 2026, SEO rank-tracking dashboards are going haywireThe Semrush Sensor flirts with 9.5/10, a level of 'Googlequake' among the highest ever recorded. Several major tools, competitors of Monitorank, report data indicating an unprecedented explosion in visibility for YouTube, TikTok, and to a lesser extent Facebook and Instagram, across all topics and global markets.
On April 1, some industry experts mentioned an explosion of YouTube's visibility in search results. But these numbers were actually the reflection of the biased SERPs that Google serves to bots, not real results. In sum, what some interpreted at the time as an almost unprecedented algorithmic quake was, at least in part, a 'measurement artefact'.
Google's anti-scraping offensive: a strategy built for the long term
This episode does not happen in a vacuum. It is part of a Google anti-scraping offensive that has been ramping up for more than a year.
- In January 2025, Google deploys SearchGuard, its anti-bot protection system applied to search results. Almost every SERP scraper experiences immediate disruption, especially those that ignore or poorly execute JavaScript.
- In September 2025, Google removes the num=100 parameter, which allowed retrieving 100 results in a single request instead of 10, forcing scrapers to multiply their calls by ten and drastically increasing their operating costs.
- In December 2025, Google takes a further step by suing SerpApi, accusing it of having bypassed SearchGuard at a scale of hundreds of millions of daily requests. The legal argument relies on the DMCA, not just the terms of service. This opens the door to potentially astronomical damages.
Google's objective leaves little room for doubt : its aim is to make scraping more technically costly, more legally risky, and now outright unreliable by corrupting the data served to detected bots.
What this means for your SEO data
The lesson of this episode is concrete: not all rank-tracking tools are equal when facing these attacks.
A tool that does not detect that it is receiving incorrect information will report false data to you and present it as true, especially if the team behind it is not reactive enough to notice and fix the problem. This is exactly what happened to several major tools in March 2026.
During periods of “shadow SERPs” (parallel result pages different from the official version), it is recommended not to place blind trust in third-party tools alone and to cross-check data with Google Search Console, which remains an unbiased first-party source.
At Monitorank, the mechanism was detected early, in February, which allowed a patch to be deployed and operational maintenance to continue, even under the pressure of massive blacklisting at the end of March. Semscraper, which shares the same technical infrastructure, benefited from the same protections.
The article “Google traps SEO bots: how Monitorank held firm against the anti-scraping offensive” was published on the site Abondance.
