Google accused of manipulating search results to hinder AI scrapers

A new report by Nozzle, a SERP monitoring firm, claims Google is deliberately altering search results to mislead AI scrapers and rank-tracking tools. The report analyzed 27.5 million SERPs and found over 660,000 keywords associated with poisoned results, with approximately 8% of SERPs affected. These altered results, appearing on both desktop and mobile versions of Google Search, often replace high-ranking links with less relevant or inaccurate content, such as social media posts. Nozzle suggests Google's actions aim to disrupt data scraping by AI bots, which collect search data to power competing services or reverse-engineer Google's algorithms. While blocking scrapers has been a past strategy, the report indicates a shift toward serving misleading data. This could inadvertently impact legitimate SEO tools, as they may also receive the manipulated results. The move may also target black-hat and gray-hat SEO practices that use AI to manipulate rankings.