Barry Schwartz: Google's War on AI Scrapers Is Breaking SEO Tools

E1190: Google is making it harder to scrape its search results, and SEO tools are getting caught in the middle. Barry Schwartz, founder of Search Engine Roundtable and one of the longest-running reporters in the search industry, joins me to break down what Google is doing, why rank-tracking data has become less reliable, and what happens next. Barry has covered Google and search every day since 2003. In this episode, we go deep on Google's fight against AI scrapers, the September 2026 spam update, scaled AI content, Google losing trust in entire websites, and the future of SEO. We cover: - Google's new GoTo redirects and what they mean for SEO tools - Why Barry says the GoTo redirect itself is not the biggest problem - Google's broader crackdown on companies scraping its search results - The widespread IP blocking targeting proxies used by scraping companies - The increase in CAPTCHAs making automated Google searches harder - Reports that Google is injecting bad or fake data into search results shown to bots - Why unreliable SERP data creates a much bigger problem for rank trackers - Why Google appears more focused on ChatGPT and SERP APIs than Ahrefs or Semrush - Why Barry doubts rank trackers will return to their previous level of reliability - Why Google Search Console has become more important as third-party data gets harder to trust - Why selling rankings becomes harder when Google controls the underlying data - What makes the September 2026 spam update different from recent spam updates - Why its long rollout suggests Google is pushing several spam systems or components - The multiple phases Barry has seen throughout the September spam update - How Google could detect sudden explosions of AI-generated pages without behavioral data - Why publishing 50,000 pages in a week creates an obvious pattern for Google - How templated programmatic content fits into Google's fight against scaled AI content - Google's complicated internal relationship with AI-generated writing - Google's new guidance telling publishers to manually review AI-generated content - Why scale matters more than whether one individual page used AI - Why spam updates and core updates require different recovery strategies - What website owners should review after getting hit by a spam update - Why Barry warns against blindly disavowing links after an update - The difference between fixing a spam violation and rebuilding a site after a core update - What John Mueller meant when he said Google's systems can "lose faith in a website" - How enough weak pages create sitewide trust and indexing problems - Why recovering from lost trust may require rewriting, removing, and pruning content - Why some Google spam systems already run continuously - Why Google keeps introducing structured data and later removing support for certain types - What actually keeps Google up at night: the enormous amount of AI content flooding the web - Why Google's problem has flipped from not having enough content to having far too much - Barry's perspective after nearly 50,000 published Search Engine Roundtable articles - Why consistency, expertise, and actually caring about the industry still matter after decades in search ⭐️ Search Engine Roundtable - https://www.seroundtable.com/  ⭐️ Barry Schwartz on 𝕏 - https://x.com/rustybrick  ⭐️ Barry Schwartz on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rustybrick/  ⭐️ Barry Schwartz's agency, RustyBrick - https://www.rustybrick.com/  💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/  00:00 Barry Schwartz Intro 01:09 GoTo Redirect Chaos 03:33 Google Blocking Tactics 07:07 Rank Tracking Future 09:06 SEO Reporting Reality 12:15 September Spam Update 15:01 Mount AI Signals 17:00 Google AI Writing Stance 20:22 Mueller Likes AI Critique 22:23 Spam Updates Hitting Harder 26:38 SEO Interest Surging 31:08 Which Sites Get Hit 32:05 Spam Update Targets 33:11 Spam Winners Losers 35:03 Old School SEO 37:15 Recovering From Hits 39:56 AI Scale Signals 41:31 Collateral Damage Stories 45:11 Google Bugs Iteration 46:14 Google And SEOs 48:44 Losing Trust Recovery 50:17 Continuous Enforcement 51:25 Schema Rise Fall 54:46 What Surprises Barry 56:04 Passion Community Work<