It is becoming more frequent that we are seeing unexpected and simultaneous failures of third-party rank tracking and SEO data instruments, with outages seemingly caused by Google changing its HTML and how it is working to prevent other players in the AI marketplace from using their results and curated SERPs for any benefit to their own products.
What we witnessed this October is a breakdown in the core data supply chain as Google made aggressive moves to stop third-parties gaining value from scraping it’s SERPs. It has been affecting dozens, if not hundreds, of marketing and SEO tools, as well as tens of thousands of SEO agencies and internal marketing departments.
In addition to third-party tools seeing new and more frequent unexpected outages of data, we are also seeing more frequent delays in data processing within Google Search Console. Unfortunately, this larger void in information happened relatively soon after the September spam update reached its final conclusion.
It has been reported quite extensively across the forums, social media, and WhatsApp groups that we are seeing blackouts for updates, which is impacting our ability to show attribution value and what we are doing.
These kinds of breakdowns in tooling can lead to a large collapse in standardized client reporting, which is the way that a lot of tasks in SEO have been conducted for over a decade, and this kind of automated data reporting seems less effective, which leads me to ask the stark question: Is rank tracking dead?
The Death Of Ranking
The traditional keyword ranking position as a metric we rely on when it comes to scoping and reporting for clients faces an inevitable extinction as our primary metric, as the historical concept of a single ranking position makes less and less sense in a modern and more complex search environment led not only by AI, but also by the accessibility of search with images or search with voice.
It also makes less sense given how AI systems work, with query fanout and grounding queries not being individual search queries typed into a search bar that result in their own search pages, but rather a behind-the-scenes mechanism that does not actually deliver a tangible result to a human. They still cloud data in Google Search Console and other third-party tools that we have come to rely on for our narrative and story building.
This means a traditional keyword rank report now fails to describe the actual user experience in an accurate or meaningful manner, especially when numerical data in a tracking tool holds relatively no connection to the visual reality of the modern SERP interface.
A human user might see a brand in an artificial intelligence summary, but a tracking tool might show a massive drop in standard rank, so the professional search industry must now start to abandon its historical obsession with classic position numbers and dated vanity metrics.
Instead, in my opinion, we must define a program of success in two specific and measurable areas, with the first being overall brand visibility.
See also: The 2003 Framework That Was Already Doing Query Fan-Out
Measuring Success Through Serving And Citing
The concept of serving describes the frequency and breadth of brand visibility across all possible surfaces, which is a comprehensive visibility metric that includes the classic ten blue links and all modern artificial intelligence features.
Third-party tools will measure this in different ways, and my recommendation to any brand looking to measure their visibility in AI is to accept three key truths.
- The first is to select a tool and stick with it, because tools measure things differently and have their own calculations and metrics, so you need to be able to make comparisons with yourself and competitors within a single tool environment, as comparing one tool to another is not going to be comparing apples-to-apples.
- Second is the harder truth, which is that you need to understand that you are not looking for linear upward growth trends, as you are more likely going to experience a lot of fluctuations due to citation drift, personalization, and the nature in which a query has been included. Whether or not that was part of the original prompt or grounded queries, we do not yet have the ability to monitor or measure this base in any other meaningful way other than acknowledging that it is happening.
- Third is to approach rank tracking very differently, as you want to have different stacks of prompts that do different things, where some are core reporting stacks, some are experimental stacks, some are edge stacks, and some are trying to measure your own drift.
Simply bundling everything into one tracker and using categorization like we have all done with keywords does not work or mirror the reality of how results are being formed in a modern search environment.
The second key area of measuring potential involves brand citing within these specific AI-generated answers, which occurs when an artificial intelligence synthesizes or summarizes within its answer a specific naming of a brand or product as its source of information, such as a URL.
This is a clear and direct citation, and in my opinion, it helps build immense trust with the user and can establish absolute topical authority.
Modern search professionals optimize website content to increase both serving and citing metrics, and a commercial brand that achieves high serving and citing scores dominates the entire modern SERP landscape.
A specific numerical rank of a single page, query, or prompt now holds minor importance compared to the total brand footprint, which is a comprehensive strategy encompassing every single touchpoint between the user and the organization on the search results page.
This is an advanced multi-surface visibility strategy that helps protect a commercial brand from extreme volatility in any single search feature or topic category, while also helping maintain communications, trust, and narrative direction with stakeholders and the c-suite.
See also: Everyone Is Quoting The Same Number And Getting Different Answers
The Future Of Search Post Ranking
The future of search marketing belongs to teams that measure real user behavior and actual business revenue. A broken keyword tracking tool causes zero boardroom panic when the customer relationship management pipeline shows consistent growth.
The core data supply chain will experience additional failures in the coming months and subsequent years. Technical teams with resilient reporting structures will survive these data blackouts and demonstrate continuous commercial value to their clients.
More Resources:
- Google Is Fighting SERP Tracking. AI Agents May Make It Worse
- Your AI Visibility Tracker Is Quietly Breaking Your Analytics And Your Strategy
- Search Console Uses Block Flattening For AIOs, Forget Position & Focus On Outcomes
Featured Image: LookerStudio/Shutterstock
