11% of My Search Console Impressions Are Competitor-Monitoring Bots | CueScoutSEO<br>11% of My Search Console Impressions Are Competitor-Monitoring Bots<br>87 of 777 impressions on cuescout.com came from queries with a dozen -site: operators in them. Zero clicks, average position 6.9, while the rest of the site sits at 53. Here's how to spot them in your own data.<br>Telman Gadimov·Founder, CueScout·July 22, 2026·5 min read

The short version<br>▸87 of 777 impressions on my site over three months came from queries containing -site: operators. Zero clicks, 0% CTR.<br>▸Those queries average position 6.9. The rest of my site averages 53. They drag the site-wide average down and make pages look like they rank when no human has seen them.<br>▸One blog post showed 69 impressions at position 7.1, which looked like my best-ranking page. 56 of those 69 impressions were bots.<br>▸The queries are brand-monitoring searches for octolens, awario, brand24, talkwalker, sprinklr. Two distinct exclusion-list fingerprints, so at least two different vendors.<br>▸Filter your Search Console queries for -site: before you read positions. It takes about a minute.<br>I was looking at Search Console last week, trying to work out whether any of my blog posts had started ranking, and one page looked like good news. /blog/social-listening-tool-for-founders, 69 impressions, average position 7.1. Page one. For a site that mostly sits on page five, that's the kind of number you screenshot.

It should have bothered me sooner that it was such an outlier. The pages either side of it in the report look like this:

PageImpressionsPosition/compare/best-reddit-monitoring-tools19550.5/compare/mention-alternative17974.1/tools/ai-visibility-checker10979.7/blog/social-listening-tool-for-founders697.1

One page at position 7 in a neighbourhood of 50 to 80. Either I'd written something unusually good, or something was wrong with the number.

So I filtered to that page and read the actual queries. They look like this:

"awario" -site:reddit.com -site:twitter.com -site:x.com -site:wykop.pl<br>-site:tripadvisor.com -site:youtube.com -site:yelp.com -site:booking.com<br>-site:facebook.com -site:instagram.com -site:tiktok.com

Nobody types that. That's a machine. And 56 of that page's 69 impressions, 81% of them, come from queries shaped like it.

What the numbers look like

I run CueScout, which scans Reddit for threads with buying intent, so I write a fair amount about social listening tools. That means my pages mention brand names like awario, brand24, talkwalker. Which, it turns out, is enough to get me swept up in whatever those companies (or their customers) are running against Google all day.

Over the three-month window in Search Console, the whole site got 777 impressions and 6 clicks. Filtering to queries that contain -site::

Whole siteQueries with -site:Impressions77787Clicks60CTR0.8%0%Average position536.9

87 of 777 is 11.2%. Zero clicks across all 87, which is what you'd expect from something that's parsing the results page rather than reading it.

The position column is the part that actually matters. These queries resolve at an average position of 6.9 while everything else I have averages 53. They are, by a distance, my best-ranking "traffic", and they represent nobody. Every one of them pulls the site-wide average position toward a number that looks like progress.

That's how a page ends up reporting position 7.1 without a single human having seen it.

There are at least two of them

Fifteen distinct queries had -site: in them. Reading through, they split cleanly into two groups by their exclusion list.

The first group always ends with the same eleven domains, in the same order, including wykop.pl (a Polish link-sharing site) and the review triple of tripadvisor.com, yelp.com, booking.com:

"octolens" -site:reddit.com -site:twitter.com -site:x.com -site:wykop.pl<br>-site:tripadvisor.com -site:youtube.com -site:yelp.com -site:booking.com<br>-site:facebook.com -site:instagram.com -site:tiktok.com

The second group uses a different set, notably fb.me, youtu.be, vm.tiktok.com and t.co, which is a list built by someone thinking about URL shorteners rather than review sites:

-site:facebook.com -site:fb.me -site:youtube.com -site:youtu.be<br>-site:youtube.be -site:twitter.com -site:instagram.com -site:tiktok.com<br>-site:vm.tiktok.com -site:t.co -site:x.com -site:reddit.com "sprinklr"

An exclusion list is a fingerprint. You build it once, you bolt it onto every query the product runs, and it never varies. Two lists means two products.

The one that convinced me these are tool-generated rather than a diligent human is this:

"brand24" -"24-7" -"24/365" -"24/7" -"brand 24 apparel" -"brand 24-hour"<br>-site:reddit.com -site:twitter.com -site:x.com -site:wykop.pl ...

Someone sat down and worked out that tracking the brand "Brand24" pulls in noise about 24/7 support hours and a clothing company called Brand 24 Apparel, and wrote negative keywords for each. That's a configuration screen, not a...