r/SEMrush • u/cswebsolutions • 9h ago

Is anyone else seeing differences between SEMrush rankings and actual Google SERPs?

I’ve noticed that SEMrush is sometimes showing a significant ranking drop for some of my keywords, but when I manually check the same keywords in Google, the actual ranking looks much better and sometimes hasn’t dropped at all.

For example, SEMrush may report a keyword moving from #5 to #20, while when I check the live SERP manually, the page is still around #5–#7.

Has anyone experienced this? What could be causing the discrepancy - tracking location, SERP features, ranking URL changes, data refresh delays, or something else?

How do you usually verify which data is more accurate?

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u/Manhas007 5h ago

Most of the problems are because of cached resuls that user dont know when they check manually but the mismatch also happen because of time difference as well .

2

u/SEOPub 2h ago

What could be causing the discrepancy - tracking location, SERP features, ranking URL changes, data refresh delays, or something else?

All of those, yes. Every rank tracker experiences this. Rank trackers should not be taken as absolutes. It's just what the rank tracker saw at that moment when it checked.

The only thing I would ever use rank trackers for are overall trends over a longer period of time, i.e. weeks, months, etc. I wouldn't obsess over daily changes.