Morningscore says Google truncated rank-tracker results for days

Morningscore, a rank-tracking vendor, says Google returned shortened result sets to many of its automated searches from the evening of September 24 (22

UTC), and that its own tool recorded the gaps as ranking losses. The company published its account on October 8. It reports that the problem peaked from September 30 through October 1, when about 60 percent of its searches came back truncated. Google has not commented.

This is a vendor describing its own data and its own mistake, so read the figures as one tracker’s measurements, not an industry count. Morningscore says it analyzed more than 4 million searches. Its method loads the first six results pages for each keyword to assemble a top 50, which normally yields about 50 results. In the truncated cases, fewer than 40 came back and the pagination links stopped at page 4 or earlier.

The missing sites were not simply the tail of the list. Comparing each truncated search with the previous check of the same keyword, Morningscore found that an average of 7.9 of the earlier top 10 sites were absent for September 25 to 30, sometimes including the first-place result. Two consecutive normal searches before September 24 differed by an average of 0.2 of 10. Before the incident, 1.2 to 1.5 percent of searches looked truncated.

The spread was wide. Across the ten markets Morningscore lists, truncation ran between 0.4 and 1.6 percent of searches for September 18 to 23. At the peak, the range was 40.4 percent (United States) to 63.3 percent (Germany). Denmark reached 61.2 percent, the Netherlands 62.9 percent, and the United Kingdom 45.1 percent.

Most of the damage reversed on its own, per the vendor. Of the sites that vanished from a truncated result, 74 percent returned to the top 20 inside three days and 92 percent eventually did. In the period before, around six of every ten vanished sites reappeared that fast. Normal-length results also shifted more than usual, and only about a third of those changes reversed in that window. Morningscore says some of that movement may be genuine.

On timing, Morningscore says its monitoring flagged a jump in keywords falling out of the top 20 at 22

UTC on September 24. It traced the cause to Google’s output on September 28, began discarding truncated results around 10 UTC on September 30, and saw truncation fall close to normal at 17 UTC on October 1. Some truncated results reappeared on October 2 and 3. As of October 4, it put the rate at 1 to 2 percent. The company concedes that “recording them as real ranking drops was on us.”

Why did it happen? Google has not said. Morningscore believes Google handled automated searches differently from human ones, and states plainly that it cannot prove this from outside. Its evidence: ordinary Chrome searches from Danish connections returned complete results simultaneously, two of its five data providers never saw the problem at scale, and on October 2 one provider saw as many as 72 percent of searches come back truncated while a newer provider saw 1 to 3 percent on the same keywords. The vendor also notes that Google dropped support for the &num=100 parameter in September 2025, another change that hit rank trackers.

Here is a way to reconcile tracker data with Search Console for September 24 to October 2. First, sort the tracker’s losses by date. Unrelated keywords that vanished together on the same days and reappeared at the next check are artifact candidates. Second, pull the same queries and dates in Search Console. A tracker loss paired with flat clicks and impressions points to a measurement problem. A loss paired with falling clicks and impressions deserves a real investigation. Search Console reports an average position across actual impressions, so it will not match a tracker’s single-point reading exactly.

The window also overlaps the September spam update. Our October 9 report that the September spam update completed after 13 days 16 hours noted a similar rank-tracker observation from SEOmonitor. Nothing in Morningscore’s post shows that truncation caused or explains any site’s real traffic change.

Mark September 24 to October 2 as a data-quality window in client reports and tracker exports, and ask each vendor whether it detects truncated results and corrected its history. Treat any loss from those dates that Search Console does not confirm as unproven.

Morningscore, “Google gave rank trackers truncated results for a week,” published October 8, 2026.