Google change disrupts SEO tools, resulting in data blackouts

Google apparently made a significant change to its system in the last 48 hours that is impacting multiple SEO tools. The change appears to have blocked many scrapers and APIs, resulting in a data blackout.

Data lags are being reported by users of SEO tools including SimilarWeb, Rank Ranger, SE Ranking, ZipTie.dev, AlsoAsked and possibly others.

Now we know. After this story published, Google today told TechCrunch it is now forcing users to turn on JavaScript to use Search. Google said “fewer than .1%” of searches on Google are done by people who disable JavaScript. Also:

• “Enabling JavaScript allows us to better protect our services and users from bots and evolving forms of abuse and spam, and to provide the most relevant and up-to-date information.”

This Google change is what caused many SEO position and data tracking tools to stop reporting data.

What happened. Shay Harel, senior director of SimilarWeb, a web analytics and market intelligence platform, shared a statement detailing what happened with Barry Schwartz:

On the night of January 15th, Google implemented significant changes to how its systems handle automated interactions. These updates temporarily disrupted rank tracking and SERP data solutions across the industry, including ours, as many existing configurations were rendered non-functional.

The changes introduced new requirements for interaction protocols, invalidating previously reliable methods and causing widespread service interruptions. At Similarweb, we rapidly adapted by identifying the root cause and deploying updates within 18 hours to restore full functionality.

This update also deprecated certain configurations, such as ads_mode: ON, which was commonly used for analyzing paid results. The shift to requiring more dynamic session handling adds complexity and raises concerns about potential depersonalization of results. These changes highlight Google’s ongoing efforts to refine its ecosystem and introduce stricter controls.

The scale of this event was unprecedented, even compared to major disruptions in 2018. It reinforces the importance of technical agility and innovation in delivering reliable data solutions for the SEO industry.

Tomek Rudzki, co-founder of ZipTie.dev, a Google AI Overviews tracking tool, also confirmed the issue on X:

• “We’ve observed a decrease (approximately 2 percentage points) in AIO detection rates through Ziptie’s tracking system. It seems Google is blocking AIO checkers in a smart way, far beyond traditional captchas. We are looking for ways to improve the AIO detection rate.”

Why we care. You likely rely on some of these tools to understand whether your SEO efforts are successful – whether your goal are helping to drive visibility, conversions, revenue for your brands and websites. Without data, we are blind. So check your tools to see if you are impacted. Hopefully it will just be temporary if you are.

Some tools unaffected. Some SEO tools seem to be unaffected by Google’s change, such as Sistrix, Monitorank, and Ahrefs.

Story developing. We are reaching out to SEO tool providers and will update this story with any more news and reactions as we get them.

First spotted. Eric Mercier published appears to be the first to have spotted this issue and published this article (in Spanish) Google bloqueó las herramientas SEO: el drama del 2025. I discovered his article via Natalia Witczyk’s LinkedIn post.

Editor’s note: Based on multiple user reports on LinkedIn, X and elsewhere, this article originally said that Semrush (disclosure: Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush) appeared to be impacted by Google’s change. A Semrush spokesperson told me this was not the case, so Semrush has been removed from the list of affected tools.

Update Jan. 20. Many tools are back working. I also wanted to highlight a great take from Patrick Hathaway, co-founder and CEO of Sitebulb, who pointed out that this isn’t an attack on keyword tools, but more likely large language models (LLMs). From LinkedIn:

“It is much more likely to be a reaction to a growing threat to Google’s dominance – LLMs like ChatGPT becoming seen as an adequate/better replacement to Google search. Google’s global market share has dropped below 90% for the first time since 2015, and they will be well aware of why.

By making their data more difficult to access at scale, Google are protecting themselves against LLMs training their data sets based on Google’s data.

SEO Tools have been scraping data from Google literally for decades. Google have always been against it as it is against their TOS, and although they have certainly tried to make it more difficult in various ways over the years, this one seems to have had the biggest widespread impact that I can remember.

The timing just makes too much sense. We know that almost all LLMs are not executing JavaScript, so in the short term this should mean they will struggle to access Google search results. In the long term, presumably it will just make the task more expensive and therefore less viable.

Google do not want LLMs accessing their search results or their AI Overviews (and which queries trigger them) – that’s the reason for this outage. Keyword tracking tools are just collateral damage.”