market intelligence
Why One Google Search Lies to You
Only 43% of the 529 domains tracked across the KZN search network appear reliably across repeated checks. A further 26% flicker in and out entirely, which is why a single ranking screenshot is close to a coin flip for over a quarter of what you'd see.
A client checks their own ranking once, sees a good position, and calls to say the SEO is working. Three days later they check again, see a worse position, and call to say it has stopped. Neither call is wrong about what they saw. Both calls are describing noise, not signal.
Across the 529 domains tracked in the current KZN search network, only 43% appear reliably — present in 90% or more of the observations for the searches they show up in. A further 31% are intermittent, showing up somewhere between a third and 90% of the time. The remaining 26% flicker — present in fewer than a third of observations for any search they’ve ever appeared in at all.
What “flickering” looks like in practice
A domain in the flickering group might sit at position 6 today, be absent from the top 20 tomorrow, and reappear at position 4 three days later. None of those three checks is wrong. All three are real, observed positions. None of them, on its own, tells you where the business actually stands.
This is not a small edge case. More than a quarter of every domain this system has ever seen in a KZN result behaves this way. If a business owner’s only data point is a single search performed on a single day, there is a real chance — better than one in four, based on this measurement — that the result they saw was not representative of anything stable.
Why repetition is the whole method
This is the specific reason TVS checks the same search repeatedly rather than once. A single observation cannot distinguish between a business that has settled at position 8 and a business that is bouncing between position 4 and position 20 depending on the day. Both would produce the exact same single screenshot. Only the repeated check tells them apart.
It also means a rank alert is only worth acting on once it has been confirmed by more than one observation. A single jump from position 12 to position 4 could be the start of a genuine improvement, or it could be one of the 26% doing what it always does. The difference only shows up in the next check, and the one after that.
What to do with this if it’s your business
Before reacting to a ranking check — good news or bad — ask how many times that position has actually been observed. A number that has shown up once carries a different kind of evidence than a number that has held for three weeks straight, even if the position itself is identical.
Data note: figures describe observed presence consistency in the TVS-tracked KZN search set from 6 to 25 August 2026. This measures how often a domain was seen, not why its visibility varies.