Over the past week, actually, starting since Friday, April 23rd, the BrightLocal tracking tool has been showing very high fluctuations and volatility in the local pack results in Google Maps and Google Search. But the local SEO community is not noticing the changes with their clients.

Here is what the tool shows for the past week or so:

Now, this is really not normal for this tool. Normally the numbers are in the 2 range and green. 6+ is almost unheard of for this tool.

The local SEO community is not noticing this in the field. A Local Search Forum thread has these comments about this over the past few days:

I asked the BrightLocal team if there is a bug with the tool and they said they would look into it. It can happen where Google makes some UI change that can impact these tools:

So for now, it seems like this may be a false alarm – at least with this specific Google local ranking tracking tool?

Forum discussion at Local Search Forum.

Update from BrightLocal confirms there is a bug: