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