Odd Rankings: Tools vs Human results

[SEO_Ron]

Anyone seeing odd ranking results lately when using tracking tools? We have a set of locally focused keywords that we track weekly and have been tracking for years. These keywords include the city name within the query and have historically shown consistent results no matter the user's location. Also historically when checking ranking positions for these keywords any automated checks would match human checks in private windows. Within the last month or so that changed. Now our automated tools whether it's SerpAPI, ScaleSerp or one-off checks using tools like https://technicalseo.com/tools/local-search/ frequently show different results than what humans see.

Again, these are keywords we have tracked manually and with tools for many years and until recently automated checks matched human checks. And I should add when I say "human checks" these are people unaffiliated with our company/business checking in private windows in various parts of the country. The human results are consistent. But now it almost seems as though Google is showing a different set of results for APIs/tools than it is for human/browser based checks.

Also, I should add these aren't minor discrepancies. We will see for example across all human checks our site ranking 1 or 2 for a specific keyword whereas the automated check won't have the site in the top 10.

Has anyone else seen anything like this? Any theories?

 

[fisicx]

Ignore the tracking tools. At best they will indicate trends. And you can mostly ignore your human checking as well.

The only thing you need to check is the number of new leads you get each day. They will tell you far more about how well your website performs than worrying about ranking.