Sistrix says its Google data collection is running at a reduced rate after further Google changes to how search results are delivered

What happened

Sistrix, a search visibility tool that collects Google result pages at scale, has had an incident open on its status page since 2026-08-27 titled "Google data collection at reduced rate". The opening note says: "For about a year now, Google has been stepping up its efforts to make the collection of search results harder. The biggest impact came from dropping the num=100 parameter in September 2025, but there have been smaller and larger changes to how search results are delivered almost every week since then." The change it described in August was Google routing result clicks through redirect URLs of the form google.com/goto, so that a result no longer carries its target URL. Sistrix wrote that it resolves those redirects, that "every resolved URL costs an additional request against Google", and on 2026-09-01 that processing was back to normal.

The update dated 2026-09-16 reopens it: "Google has made further changes to the way search results are delivered. As a result, our data collection is currently running at a reduced rate. We are adapting our processes accordingly and will provide further updates here." The page had no later update when we read it on 2026-09-19.

Search Engine Roundtable reported on 2026-09-18 that the effect is wider than one vendor. Barry Schwartz writes that Derek Perkins of Nozzle told him most of his tools' attempts to get data from Google Search have been blocked, with "about an 80% drop in data", and that Perkins saw the same in data from DataForSEO. Steve Paine of Sistrix told him: "Our data collection is running at a reduced rate as a result, but data is flowing, the Toolbox is updating and we are adapting our processes." Schwartz says he contacted about a dozen other tools and had not heard back. The Nozzle and DataForSEO statements come from that one report.

The same report reproduces a post by SEO consultant Glenn Gabe dated 2026-09-18 about one site he says lost nearly all its Google traffic and then fully recovered: "ahrefs picks up the recovery. Sistrix does NOT pick up the recovery. Semrush shows recovery, but it lagged a bit." Gabe says he checked the tools against the site's real traffic. That is one consultant's reading of one site.

Google has made no statement about the September changes. Schwartz's headline says Google "may be" more successful at blocking scrapers, and he writes that he has no confirmation from other tools.

Why it matters if you watch AI visibility

• Any chart built from collected Google result pages depends on that collection working: rankings, visibility indexes, and AI Overview presence as measured by third-party tools. A vendor running "at a reduced rate" refreshes fewer keywords less often. A flat or falling line this week may be the tool's coverage and not your site.
• Check a tool's chart against first-party data before acting on it. Search Console and your own analytics are not collected by scraping and are not affected. Gabe's example is that check: the site's traffic showed a recovery that one of three tools did not. Our Search Console read of our own comparison pages, published today, uses only first-party data for that reason.
• Sistrix's note says each masked URL costs an additional request, which makes collection "more complex and more expensive". If a vendor tracks your keywords or AI Overview presence daily, ask whether that cadence held through September.
• Tools that measure what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity say by calling those engines' own APIs do not collect Google result pages and are not touched by this. AskedAbout's checks work that way, as our comparison of AI visibility tools states, and for the same reason we do not measure Google's AI Overviews.

How this was verified

We read the Sistrix status page directly on 2026-09-19 and quote it verbatim. The Nozzle, DataForSEO, Steve Paine and Glenn Gabe statements are quoted from Search Engine Roundtable's 2026-09-18 article, which we also read directly; we did not read Gabe's post at its source and have not contacted any vendor. We have no measurement of our own on how much Google result data any tool is missing.