It looks like we are seeing another surge in the Google Search Console Search Performance report when you filter by the product snippets search appearance filter. We had this happen in May of this year, it was a bug that Google fixed, and now we are seeing it happen again.
I checked several Search Console profiles and they all show a surge in reporting for that product snippets search appearance filter as of August 13th/14th. Here is one of the many charts I looked at:
Chloe Smith notified me of this on X this morning, she said:
Has anyone else seen a weird increase in "Product Snippet" search appearance clicks/impressions in GSC?Can see this for several clients on pages products aren't present, with no Schema implemented... And I'm baffled.
She is right - this might be another bug.
Last time this happened, John Mueller of Google said:
The folks here are looking into the details of this, and it does look like a bug on our side in Search Console reporting (and FWIW it doesn't seem to be related to AI Overviews at all, but I can see how that would be tempting). Once we know more (and ideally have fixed it), we'll likely add an annotation in Search Console & an entry in the data anomalies page.
Then a day or so later, Google updated its data anomalies Search Console page over here and the rich results section (which was removed) to say:
May 15 - 27 (Search results)A logging error affected Search Console reporting on product snippets from May 15, 2024 until May 27, 2024. As a result, you may notice an increase in clicks and impressions during this period for the Product snippet search appearance type in the performance report and impressions overlay in the product snippet rich result report. This is just a logging issue, not an actual change in clicks or impressions.
So maybe this is an old bug that popped up again or maybe it is a new bug or maybe it is a new feature?
I don't know. When I hear back, I will update this story.
Forum discussion at X.
