for anyone doing rank tracking, there was a major update Google rolled out globally last night to try and block crawling. This is a ???? to dig into the changes
I tried decoding it using Google's standard base64+protobuf encoding that Google uses for most other things ( from @Valentin Pletzer), but it's not valid base64
I’m guessing not many tool provider would be comfortable sharing if they have problems. If Google now starts to crack down on scrapers this would be huge. I guess @Barry Schwartz could ask around.
We've observed a decrease (approximately 2 percentage points) in AIO detection rates through Ziptie's tracking system. It seems Google is blocking AIO checkers in a smart way, far beyond traditional captchas. We are looking for ways to improve the AIO detection rate.
DataForSEO already had some more expensive options to get pixel data and whatnot, that likely used Chrome, so I wonder if they're routing all requests through that infrastructure for now
Commenting to follow, but I'm not seeing any issues in the data, or customer complaints from Ahrefs users. I just checked and we have recent SERPs and can pull live SERPs.
Fresh in: Google starts intensifying its anti-scraping measures, introducing stricter protections such as IP blocking and CAPTCHAs. Popular SEO tools like… | 32 comments on LinkedIn
We ended up getting blocked last night around 9pm ET, but we're starting to look good this morning.
@Derek Perkins I completely agree with that post. I started noticing Google results (instead of Bing) in ChatGPT results and I think Google was not amused.