How big of an impact do you think rank tracking has on keyword search volume?

[Wunderkind]

I was looking at some really competitive keywords that according to Google's Keyword Planner are searched around 10,000 times per month.

I ran an AdWords campaign and found the volume on almost all of these to be lower than that. 

It got me thinking about what kind of an impact rank trackers could potentially have on search volume.

I use a rank tracking platform that tracks keywords daily. Think about a really competitive search term. Conservatively, say that 50 individuals/businesses are going after that term aggressively and tracking their progress. If they are all using daily rank trackers, that is an average of about 1,500 additional searches on the term each month.

On a larger scale, think about something like the term "auto insurance". How many local insurance agents are tracking a term like that on a local level, which would feed into the national search volume? I did not bother to look up the search volume for that term, but I would guess it is in the range of 800,000 to over 1 million searcher per month. Would it be unreasonable to think that 100,000-150,000 of those queries are just automated rank trackers?

Do you think Google has any mechanism in place for detecting these and not counting them in the search volume they report? Do you think they even care?

[Mike Friedman]

I have actually seen this a few times with local search clients. I usually re-evaluate keywords every 4-6 months. With local search you are often working with search volumes that can go as low as 20-30 searches per month depending on the type of business.

I'll see keywords from time to time that seem to be rising in search volume (like 30 searches doubling to 60), which does make me think if it is just from us checking rankings. 

I even sometimes have seen a keyword we rank #1 for that supposedly is searched 50-60 times per month, but we see 1-2 visitors over the course of 3-4 months. Those make me wonder if they are 100% rank trackers. 

I don't see it often though, which makes me think Google has gotten pretty good at telling the difference between a rank tracker and actual search. A rank tracker is likely checking pages 1-10 without every clicking on a SERP listing. That pattern would be pretty easy to detect.

[JohnHemmer]

I never thought about this before, but I could see in smaller niches it having an impact. You and 2 other competitors go after a keyword that Google says is searched 100 times per month. If all 3 of you are checking the search results daily (most rank trackers do), in 12 months will it look like the search volume doubled? 

I have never tracked something like that, but it would be interesting to test the impact.

I'm guessing that Google is somehow weeding a lot of these out. As @Wunderkind mentioned, in really big niches where you might have thousands of people tracking keywords you would see some really big jumps in search volume.