Rank trackers are getting caught by Google's AI-scraping block, SERPrecon's maker says

A rank tracker reads Google's results page every day for every keyword a team cares about, which is a form of automated query Google has never liked. Search Engine Journal's Roger Montti reports that the blocks Google is tightening against AI scrapers are now also stopping rank trackers, and the maker of one of them says the service may not survive it.

The maker is Ryan Jones, who builds SERPrecon. His quote, as Montti reports it, is that "we're getting to the point where nobody will have rank tracking anymore because of the crazy amount of AI scraping going on." SERPrecon is one tool among several that read Google's results pages for SEO teams, and Jones is naming the pressure as a volume problem rather than a policy one.

What changed

The scraping volume is Cloudflare's number. Cloudflare said HTTP requests across its network went from 63 million per second at the end of 2024 to 115 million per second at present, with peaks above 150 million per second, and that for the first time more than half of internet traffic is not from a human. Cloudflare attributes much of the growth to AI agents, whose traffic it says is up 1,700 percent over the past year.

Google has reasons to care about this at two layers. Montti notes that AI-driven search queries cost Google more to answer than a classic text search, because the response is generated rather than fetched. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said on the Q2 2026 earnings call that Google "reduced the cost of AI Mode responses to its lowest level since launch, even as we've brought more advanced AI capabilities." The second concern Montti raises is distillation: rivals reading enough of Google's output can learn its ranking logic, which Google would rather not hand to them.

Why this hits rank trackers

A rank tracker and a scraper look the same to a defender. Both are automated clients asking for the same results page as a human would, at scale, without a session that behaves like a person browsing. Montti writes that Google has taken what he calls an adversarial approach to automated queries, with the public focus on rank trackers while the real pressure is elsewhere. The practical result Jones is reporting is that his tool is being caught by blocks aimed at AI scrapers.

The SEO team's position is awkward. The rank tracker is often the only daily signal of what Google is doing to a page's position, because Search Console reports clicks and impressions a few days late and averaged. A team used to seeing a Monday-morning position chart may stop seeing one and have to make slower, less confident calls on what moved.

Two things to watch over the next weeks. Whether rank-tracking services negotiate a tolerated path with Google, as some have in the past, and whether the industry moves toward lower-frequency sampling that stays below the blocking threshold. Montti reports the current state: today's trackers are being blocked.

Source

Roger Montti, Search Engine Journal, 5 October 2026. Cloudflare request figures from Cloudflare's own reporting as quoted in that piece.