Semrush has confirmed that Google is returning inaccurate search results to some automated ranking tools, describing the problem as industry-wide, Search Engine Land reported on October 27, 2026. Ahrefs, AccuRanker, BrightLocal and other rank trackers have reported similar issues since September 2026, raising an uncomfortable question for anyone who lives by their rank tracker: what if the rankings you are looking at are not the rankings your users actually see?
The coverage describes two distinct problems, and the distinction matters. The first is irrelevant results: pages that have little or nothing to do with the query, sometimes appearing as high as page one. The second is subtler and arguably more dangerous: partially inaccurate results, where the page looks normal at a glance but loosely related results creep in further down the page.
The example given makes the mechanism easy to grasp. A Brazilian search for a baby stroller returned a dental supply page, apparently because both used the Portuguese word carrinho. That is not a ranking judgement gone wrong in the usual sense; it is a matching failure, where a shared word bridges two unrelated meanings. For SEOs, the lesson is that not every strange ranking movement is a penalty, an algorithm update, or a competitor surge. Sometimes the measuring instrument itself is misfiring.
Ahrefs put the rate at 5% to 20% of results depending on the provider, which is a wide range but a striking one even at the low end. If one in twenty tracked results is unreliable, then small day-to-day movements in a tracker are essentially noise, and even larger swings deserve a second look before anyone acts on them. At the high end, one in five, whole keyword sets could be telling a misleading story.
Semrush said it has adjusted its data sources, added validation, and recollects suspect data, which is the right response from a tool vendor. But no vendor can fully fix data that arrives already wrong from the source, and the coverage notes that Google has not confirmed intentionally manipulating results. The honest reading is that this is an unresolved data-quality problem, not a settled explanation, and SEOs should treat tracker data with more scepticism than usual until it clears.
The practical advice from the coverage is simple and worth adopting as a rule: check Search Console and historical rankings before acting on sudden changes. Search Console shows what Google actually served and clicked in its own systems, so a tracker swing that does not appear there is a strong signal that the tracker, not your site, moved. Historical rankings add a second check, because a genuine loss usually has a shape over time, while a data glitch often appears as a sudden, isolated spike.
This is also a good moment to widen the set of signals you trust. If traffic, impressions, and conversions are steady while one tracker shows a drop, believe the business metrics. If several independent tools agree, and Search Console agrees too, then act. The worst response to a poisoned result is a panicked site change: rewriting pages, disavowing links, or restructuring a site to chase a ranking that was never real in the first place.
Link builders are exposed to this problem in a specific way, because prospecting and reporting both lean heavily on rank data. A prospect that looks like it has collapsed may simply be mismeasured, and a campaign that looks like it failed may have succeeded in the real results. Before reporting a loss to a client, or before dropping a keyword target, cross-check it in Search Console and in a second tool.
There is also an opportunity hidden in the mess. Agencies and freelancers who explain this issue plainly to clients, and who show their verification steps, will look more credible than competitors who forward tracker screenshots without comment. In a period when the data itself is under a cloud, the most valuable reporting is not the prettiest chart; it is the chart you can defend.
Sources: Search Engine Land, October 27, 2026.
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