Google Blocks Search Data Scraping: What This Means for Your SEO Reporting

Christie Wade
Sep 25
2 min read

If you’ve noticed a sudden drop in impressions in your SEO dashboards since mid-September, you’re not imagining it. Google has quietly made a change that affects how third-party tools report search results - and it could impact how you interpret your organic search performance.

*Reported impressions for positions 1-20 have remained stable. There has been a significant drop in reported impressions for positions 21+ (example data shown).*

What happened?

Google has taken steps to block automated bots and scrapers from pulling huge amounts of search data. 3^rd party reporting tools (like SEMrush and Ahrefs) used to collect rankings by constantly querying Google’s top 100 results. Every automated visit counted as an impression, inflating reported numbers.

In mid-September (we see impact from 12 September), Google quietly removed the ability for scrapers to pull 100 results for one query, effectively cutting out bot-generated impressions. This aligns with Google’s Spam Policy on Machine-Generated Traffic.

Don’t panic! While you will probably see a sudden drop in impressions and a change in position – these shifts reflect more accurate human behaviour, not worse SEO performance. Your business clicks, traffic, and website-actions are unaffected.

What This Change Means for Your Business

Fewer Inflated Impressions: Expect reported impressions to drop, especially for low-ranking pages, because automated bot activity is no longer counted.
Average Position May Rise: Since low-ranking “bot impressions” are gone, average position metrics may appear higher.
Clicks and Top Rankings Are Stable: Actual human traffic + real positions remain unaffected. Your business performance is still the same; only the dataset has adjusted.
Third-Party Tools Are Impacted: Reports from tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs will not be able to show ranking positions past the top page (approx 10-20 positions).

*Google blocks automated bots and scrapers from 12 September 2025: Expect to see reported impressions drop and a rise in average position.*

At this stage, neither Google nor SEMRush have made an official statement on the change. Ahrefs have made an early statement. We will continue to keep our partners updated.