What happened

If you pay an SEO agency to get your site higher up in Google’s results, you probably get a ranking report every month, with lines charting where you rank for a handful of keywords. Those positions are mostly recorded by rank-tracking tools: every day, the tool goes to Google automatically, searches for the terms you care about, saves the page of results that comes back and works out where your site sits on it. So the raw material of your report is the page the tool brings back from Google.

On 10 October, Nozzle, a company that makes these tools, published research saying that raw material has a problem. Looking at the results pages it had collected for its customers from mid-September on, it found that about 8% had been swapped: the page looks completely normal, but most of the sites that normally rank near the top have vanished; search again a few days later and they’re back. It was worst at the end of September and was still going on into October. The research covered 49 countries, and in Taiwan about 8.4% of results pages were judged to have been swapped, much the same as overall. It only looked at the pages the tools brought back, though, and doesn’t say whether ordinary people searching for themselves run into this too.

Nozzle’s explanation goes like this: some people use programs to collect Google’s search results in bulk and feed them into AI answers, and Google is deliberately going after those programs; rank trackers collect data the same way, so they’ve been caught up in it. That is only Nozzle’s inference, and Google hasn’t responded publicly. Several similar companies (such as SE Ranking and Sistrix) have also put out notices warning customers that something is off with their ranking data.

Why it matters to you

Plenty of business owners judge whether their SEO is working by the lines in that report. Nozzle found that sites normally on the first page often drop out of the top ten on swapped pages, so some of the plunges your report shows for late September and early October may never have happened. How do you tell? Start with whether it climbs back quickly. Nozzle’s data shows that drops caused by swapping mostly recover within three days, so our inference is that a plunge that’s back where it was within two or three days is most likely swapping, not a real change in rankings.

Say you run a home cleaning company in Pingtung. Your monthly report arrives in early October: on 28 September, your site fell from third place to somewhere past the first page for “Pingtung home cleaning”. The gap on the chart is hard to miss; you don’t notice that it climbed back two days later, and all you can think is whether something is wrong with your site; you very nearly sign the homepage redesign quote your agency attached.

Over the same weeks, Google really did move rankings: from 24 September to 8 October, it ran a ranking adjustment against sites it judged to be breaking its rules (officially, a spam update), and some sites genuinely dropped. So a plunge in your report could be a swapped page or a real fall, and looking at the day it dropped on its own, you can’t tell which.

What to do about it

Hold off on changing your website: a plunge in the report you got in early October may not be real. The swapping was still going on into October, so the one that arrives in early November may show it too.

If you see a plunge, ask your SEO agency to check two things first. One: whether the keyword’s ranking returned to where it was within two or three days; a keyword that climbs back in two days, like the one in Pingtung, is, by our inference above, most likely swapping. Two: what Search Console, the dashboard Google gives site owners, shows for the same period; it logs how many times your site was shown in search results and how many times it was clicked. Nozzle says that if the report shows your site has disappeared but Search Console still records people seeing it and clicking on it, that means nothing has happened to your site. If both checks say the drop is real, then talk to your agency about what to change.

Leave those two checks to your agency. Searching Google yourself won’t tell you anything: by the time the monthly report arrives, those late-September days are long gone, and what you see when you search now is today’s page. A swapped page also looks just like the real thing; even the tool companies have to compare each keyword against its record over the previous few weeks, entry by entry, to catch one.

Once you’ve checked, if your site really does need changing, don’t keep your eyes on your Google rankings alone. Many customers looking for a business now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity directly, with something like “Which home cleaning company in Pingtung is any good?” Before answering, these AIs often look things up online, and the services and service areas listed on your website are part of the raw material they use to describe you. And AI doesn’t wait until you’ve finished making changes before it looks: when a customer asks today, it’s already describing you from what your site says now.

SEO is the fight to rank high on Google; GEO is the fight over whether AI’s answers include you and how they describe you. Our managed GEO service can take the AI side off your hands entirely: our team fixes your site’s content. Beyond your site, Google Maps and your business listings on other platforms are talking about you too, and we get them all telling the same story. Then we regularly check how AI engines describe you, and you just review the results.

Whether or not your site ends up changing, you can see how AI describes you right now: request a demo, a session with one of our consultants where they show you live. The consultant takes a question like the “best home cleaning in Pingtung” one above, swaps in your line of business, asks ChatGPT on the spot, and shows you whether you’re in its answer and how it describes what you do. The consultant will also use the GEO audit during the demo to look at the raw material on your own site: geoweb.tw’s free website audit, which checks how well AI can understand your site and scores it across 12 areas.

Further reading