Over the past few days, the IRS website (and other government sites) has tanked within Google’s search results. My gut feeling is that the federal government implemented some bot-blocking that was too aggressive and blocked Google, among others, resulting in Google not fully showing the IRS website. I believe the IRS implemented some fixes, and the website is slowly coming back in Google Search.
Searching for the IRS website in Google still shows a broken favicon and also no description for the search result snippet. It implies Google cannot access the website in order to create the description and to pull the favicon:
The SEO industry spotted this when we noticed PDFs dropping out of Google Search. Lily Ray and Glenn Gabe dug into the IRS site and noticed major issues with pages being removed and/or downgraded in Google Search.
Lily Ray posted on X a Sistrix chart showing the drop in rankings across numerous keywords:
She also showed how [irs tax brackets] showed the IRS in a lower position with just a URL, broken favicon and no description:
She also said, she was unable to access the site as a human on desktop:
But now, as of this morning, I am not seeing things getting better. Not just with the PDFs situation but also with that specific listing:
Here are the posts from Lily and Glenn:
This IRS (@IRSnews) SEO issue is pretty wild. They’ve taken a nosedive in visibility on Google right now.
Look at all the keywords they ranked #1 for last month, and now they hardly rank at all:
– stimulus
– identify theft protection
– free tax filing
– tax bracketsYou can… pic.twitter.com/dcLbmK65jB
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) August 26, 2026
I see the IRS site is still looking great in the SERPs… LOL. Something weird happened with the site (and other gov sites recently like https://t.co/olt00TiGr3). They tanked in visibility right around the spam update. And the IRS lost its favicon as well. So could be on Google’s… https://t.co/DABqcZZoHy pic.twitter.com/XWDsdB1z7m
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 27, 2026
My guess is we will see the IRS and the other federal sites return to Google Search very soon.
Forum discussion at X.
