Reddit's Still Down. Let's Talk About Who Owns Your Rank Data.

Every morning, before coffee, somebody on your team opens one of the rank tracking tools you pay for and reads a number off it like it's gospel. Position 4. Down two spots. Client's going to ask about it on Thursday's call. Nobody in that meeting stops to ask how the number got there, whether the company fetching it is even allowed to, or whether "position 4" still means what it meant two years ago.

Reddit's Down Again, So We Went Looking Elsewhere

Normally this is where we'd pull the actual thread from r/TechSEO or r/SEO where someone is arguing about this in real time, because that's usually the fastest way to find a pain point before it makes it into a press release. We checked. Reddit is still down, both through direct fetch attempts and site:reddit.com searches, and neither turned up anything usable. So we went to the source that's quietly doing the same job this week: Search Engine Roundtable's August 2026 Google Webmaster Report, published August 4, which rounds up a month of small Google news items that individually look minor and, read together, describe exactly the anxiety a Reddit thread would have surfaced anyway.

Rank Tracking Tools Sit on Shakier Legal Ground Than You Think

Here's the mechanic almost nobody outside SEO thinks about: rank tracking tools and serp tracking tools don't get a clean API feed from Google that says "here's where you rank for this keyword today." No such feed exists for the public. What exists instead is a business built on repeatedly querying Google's search results pages, parsing what comes back, and reselling that as a dashboard. Every agency, every in-house SEO team, every platform that reports "we moved you from position 9 to position 3" is, several layers down, dependent on some company's scraping infrastructure holding up and staying legal.

That's the context for the SerpApi story. Google sued SerpApi over unauthorized scraping of its search results pages — the kind of scraping that rank tracking and serp tracking tools have run on for years, whether or not most SEOs think about it while they're screenshotting a ranking chart for a client deck. The case was dismissed. Worth being precise here, because it's easy to spin this two different ways and both would be wrong. A dismissal is not a court ruling that scraping SERPs for rank tracking is broadly legal — dismissals happen for procedural reasons that don't always reach the merits, and this one doesn't set a precedent that closes the question for the next company Google decides to sue. It's also not evidence that rank tracking tools are on thin ice. It's a single data point in a legal argument that keeps resurfacing and keeps not getting resolved, one lawsuit at a time.

Rank Tracking Tools Can't See What AI Overviews Are Doing to Half of Search

Set the legal question aside for a second, because there's a second problem sitting right next to it, and it's arguably the bigger one. Per the same August 4 roundup, roughly half of all Google searches now trigger an AI Overview. That's not a niche feature anymore. That's the median search experience. And a rank position, the number your serp tracking tools report every morning, was designed for a results page that mostly doesn't exist in that form anymore for half the queries you're tracking. We've made a version of this point before, looking at three rank trackers disagreeing about the same ranking swing and asking whether ai visibility tracking is a vanity metric in its current form. This is the same problem from a different angle: even a perfectly accurate, perfectly legal rank number is measuring less of the page than it used to.

The same roundup adds two details that make the gap wider, not narrower. Google integrated Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite into AI Overviews and AI Mode, which means the summary sitting above your blue link is now running on a newer, faster model than the one that generated it a few months ago, and it will keep changing underneath you without a changelog you get to read. And AI-generated images are now showing up inside AI Overviews themselves, adding a visual layer to the answer box that a text-based rank position has no way to describe, let alone measure. Your rank tracking tools can tell you where a URL sits in the blue links. They can't tell you whether an AI-generated image sitting above those links answered the query well enough that nobody scrolled down to you at all.

This matters most for exactly the accounts where a single ranking chart still drives the client conversation: B2B and SaaS pipelines where a page ranking third for a category term used to be a safe proxy for demand captured. It isn't a safe proxy anymore, on its own. If half your reported keyword set is now surfacing under an AI Overview built on a model that changed this quarter, tying pipeline back to organic and AI has to become part of the reporting conversation, not an optional add-on you get to when there's time. Ask any go-to-market team; ai search visibility is starting to matter more to their forecast than the position column ever did.

Google's Record Quarter, and Why Your Toolstack Isn't the One in Control

Here's the part that should reset your expectations about who has leverage in this relationship. The same reporting period covered by SER's roundup, Google posted a record quarter: ad revenue up 14.5% year over year, total revenue up 24%. That's not a company under financial pressure to slow down changes to how AI Overviews work, or to make life easier for the rank tracking tools that depend on scraping its results pages. It's a company with every incentive to keep shipping exactly the kind of changes, new models folded into AI Overviews, new image formats inside the answer box, that make yesterday's rank-position dashboard less complete tomorrow. All of this is happening in the same stretch where Google is also absorbing a DMA fine out of Brussels from earlier this summer, which hasn't slowed any of it down either.

Put the legal question and the revenue number next to each other and the picture gets clearer, not muddier. A rank tracking vendor fighting a scraping lawsuit is defending its right to keep observing a system it doesn't control, run by a company that just posted a record quarter with no reason to freeze that system in place for anyone's convenience. That's not a crisis. It's just the actual balance of power, and it's worth building your reporting and analytics process around that reality instead of around the assumption that a rank position is a stable, permanent unit of measurement. It never fully was. It's less so now.

Do This Next: Stress-Test the Rank Tracking Tools You Already Pay For

None of this means drop your rank tracking tools, cancel the subscription, or panic in the next client meeting. It means treat the toolstack the way you'd treat any other vendor with legal exposure and a shrinking share of the picture: know exactly what it does well, know exactly what it can't see, and don't let either fact surprise you mid-quarter.

The honest version of this story isn't that rank tracking tools are broken, or that the SerpApi dismissal proves anything permanent one way or the other. It's that the ground under a tool you check every single day, the thing you use to prove your work is real, is legally unsettled and measuring a shrinking share of what actually happens on a results page. That was true before this week's roundup. The roundup just put a date and a court case on it. The next time someone hands you a ranking chart as the whole story, the useful question isn't whether the number is right. It's what the number stopped being able to see.

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