Nozzle found out: "The page looks normal. The results don’t. No error, no captcha, the same template, but m…
by Marcel Hollerbach · World of Commerce
#AIWars. This is why you should not crawl 🤖. Absolutely incredible. Google is deliberately serving fake search results to scrapers! The likes of Google and Bing have been doing this for years already, but this time it looks like an escalation.
Nozzle found out: "The page looks normal. The results don’t. No error, no captcha, the same template, but most of the keyword’s usual sites are gone: the organic results keep 20.7% of the previous SERP’s sites, against 88.5% before."
The fake results are only presented to scrapers; regular users keep seeing the normal results.
No wonder platforms rely more and more on structured data like product feeds delivered directly from the source of truth.