Rank trackers lost Google data on September 13 — verify the drop in Search Console before you edit
Third-party rank trackers have been running on incomplete Google data since September 13 while Google lists no September ranking incident, so this week's action is to confirm any traffic drop in Search Console's own Performance report before editing your site.
Rank trackers lost their footing at almost exactly the moment search forums started arguing about a Google update. Derek Perkins, who runs the rank-tracking service Nozzle, told Search Engine Roundtable that most of his tools' attempts to read Google's search results were being blocked, cutting the data he could collect by around 80%, and that he saw the same pattern in DataForSEO's data. Sistrix's Steve Paine told the same site that Google had changed how results are delivered, and the Sistrix status page carries a September 16 note saying its collection is "running at a reduced rate". 12
The same fortnight carried Google's strangest movement of the year. Sites fell steeply around September 4, and on September 13 a number of them surged back, a reversal Glenn Gabe charted and Search Engine Roundtable reported. The drop and the recovery showed up in those sites' own analytics, which is what separates this from a charting artifact. 3 Two days later the chatter spiked again: practitioners on WebmasterWorld described mass movement in their rankings, a shop whose Google traffic stopped converting at 4 p.m. on the dot, and Discover feeds dropping stories within hours. 45
Google's Search Status Dashboard lists the August 2026 spam update, which ran from August 18, as its most recent ranking incident, and has posted nothing for September. 6 So a tracker chart that fell in mid-September has two possible explanations and the same shape either way: your site lost visibility in the wave, or the tool lost sight of a page that never moved. Gabe's own comparison shows how far apart the tools can land on one site. On a site that dropped by nearly 100% and then recovered in full, Ahrefs picked up the recovery, Semrush followed it late, and Sistrix missed it entirely. 1
The one action: read the drop in Google's numbers before the tool's
Search Console's Performance report is built from Google's own logs of how often your pages appeared in results and were clicked, so the collection problems above stop at the tool layer. The whole check runs on data you already have, and it settles whether this week's drop belongs to your site or to your measurement of it.
- Open Performance and put two weeks side by side. In Search Console, open Performance, choose Search results, set the date range to the last 7 days, and turn on Compare so the previous 7 days sit beside it. The filter row above the chart covers web, image, video, and news results. 7
- Read clicks and impressions by date before anything else. Add the date breakdown under the chart. A tracker dip that leaves both lines close to last week's belongs to the tracker's collection, and your site needs no edit. A dip that shows up in both lines is a real visibility loss, and step 3 narrows it.
- Narrow a confirmed drop by query and by page. Open the Queries and Pages tables for the same two weeks and sort by the change in clicks. A handful of queries moving together points to one section of your site; movement spread across unrelated queries points to the site's overall standing. Position in these tables is an average across every impression, so a page ranking first for one query and fortieth for another reads as the midpoint. 8
- Read the vendor's status page before the vendor's chart. Sistrix publishes its collection notices at status.sistrix.com, and the September 16 entry names the reduced rate in the vendor's own words. 2 While such a notice stands, that chart is an input you cannot check against anything except the sites it claims to describe.
What the same check shows a week later
The WebmasterWorld thread describes a wave passing through rather than landing. One publisher's Discover traffic recovered over the September 12–14 weekend and he called his numbers normal again; another came back to about 20% below his baseline; a third watched his shop's front page disappear from its main keywords for a day and return the next morning. 5 If your clicks and impressions drift back toward their late-August line over the coming week, the wave passed through your site and the pages themselves earned no edit.
A loss that Search Console confirms, and that holds after the wave has moved on, deserves a diagnosis. The Manual actions report is where a cause scoped to a URL pattern would already be named, and everything after that should rest on your own Search Console data rather than a chart you cannot verify.
Two limits belong with the reading. The newest day or two of Performance data is still being collected and can change, which Google marks on the chart with a dotted line. 7 Search Console's own reports lost data this month as well: the Crawl Stats report is missing September 15 across every property, a gap Google has restored in past cases. 9
Write this week's click and impression totals down somewhere you will find them, then run the same comparison next Monday. One number you can trust beats a dashboard that quietly stopped collecting.
References
- 1
- 2SISTRIX Status
status.sistrix.com
- 3Google Search Update September 4th That Reverted September 13th?
seroundtable.com
- 4
- 5September 2026 Google Search Observations
webmasterworld.com
- 6Google Search Status Dashboard
status.search.google.com
- 7Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup
support.google.com
- 8What are impressions, position, and clicks?
support.google.com
- 9
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