Why Have My Google Search Impressions and Rankings Just Tanked???

So for the 2nd time in as many months, I feel compelled to post another update on what’s going on in the world of Google and SEO. That should tell you just how quickly things are moving out here in search marketing! If you monitor your website on either Google Search Console (GSC) or through a third party rank tracking tool, you might have noticed an alarming drop in your website ‘visibility’ around September 12th. While it caught everyone in the SEO community off-guard, the headline message is:

No - your rankings did not just fall off the edge of a cliff!

Here’s what actually happened.

Google Deprecates A Search Parameter

In true Google style, they threw the SEO community a curveball a couple of weeks ago by dropping support for showing 100 results on the page with the URL parameter ‘&num=100’. While this doesn’t affect the average Google searcher, it does affect most of the tools SEO’s use to track their website search rankings, such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking and Moz.

The ‘&num=100’ query allowed SEO platforms, crawlers, and data scrapers to pull the top 100 results for a term in one go instead of the usual 10 that you see when you perform a Google search.

This means that the ranking tools now have to run 10 requests for every term you are tracking instead of one, to retain visibility tracking for the top 100.

The problem was that no-one got any warning that this was going to happen so most of the SEO tracking software threw a complete wobbly and this made it look like many people’s rankings had nosedived. They had not! We were just not getting full visibility of the top 100 positions for each term - more likely just top 10 result visibility or top 20 at best.

How Did This Affect Google Search Console?

Many of us who look at search console data every day, noticed this sharp drop in impressions in mid-September. In fact, 90% of the sites I manage saw this big drop in impressions, but not clicks. The timing of the decline aligned too closely with the retirement of the ‘&num=100’ parameter for it to be a coincidence. And it wasn’t.

So it turns out that when Google disabled the use of ‘&num=100’, it didn’t just break the ranking tools. It also caused a massive drop in search impressions in Google Console, as first noticed by Aussie SEO, Brodie Clarke.

To understand what’s going on you have to first understand what a search impression is.

What is a search impression?

A Search Impression is recorded in Google Search Console each time your website’s URL (or a page) is retrieved and displayed in the page of results for a specific query, where a user could potentially see it. In simple terms, search impressions count the number of times your web page was visible in the search results, regardless of whether someone clicked it.

To unpack that:

• It doesn’t require a click — just visibility in the results listing for that query.

• It counts even if your page appears on page 2, 3, etc., as long as GSC deems that slot visible.

• Over time, the pattern of impressions (rising, falling, or shifting) helps you infer changes in visibility, keyword reach and potential traffic opportunity.

Why Did Impressions Drop In Search Console (But Not Clicks)?

What we now believe happened is that the ranking tools were generating search impressions every time they used the ‘&num=100’ search parameter, to check your rankings. When they generated a page containing 100 results, your website was racking up impressions without a human actually ever seeing it.

When the ‘&num=100’ stopped working all that ’bot’ traffic disappeared and those ‘artificial’ impressions were wiped out.

There are multiple implications of this change. For example, it may mean that your click through rate (the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click) is slightly better than has previously been reported.

It also has implications for what we call ‘zero click search’ which I talked about in my last blog about the impact of AI overviews on website traffic. It’s possible that the rise in impressions where clicks didn’t follow, may not have been related to the increase in AI overviews but scraping by the automated tools.

What Does This Mean For My SEO?

Well, it’s really important to highlight that your rankings have likely not changed, beyond what you’d normally expect to see.

When it comes to Google Search Console there are 4 key takeaways:

1. The reality is that the data in search console is now much cleaner - a much more reliable reflection of reality.

2. Your average position figure may actually increase as impressions are filtered out. (even though your actual positions in search haven’t changed drastically)

3. Reset your benchmarks when it comes to impressions

4. Focus on clicks and average positions until there is more like for like comparison data for search impressions

When it comes to the SEO 3rd party rank tracking tools, most of the software suppliers have developed workarounds to the removal of the &num=100 parameter. It’s likely however, that the data from the past month (and perhaps the next few weeks) will be less reliable, particularly for terms ranking below page 2 (positions 20 - 100).

Again - it’s important to say that it’s not the actual rankings that have changed - just the reporting of them.

The key is in utilising all the data at our disposal including through Google Analytics (GA4) to ensure that website traffic is unaffected and to look at conversion metrics.

The removal of the &num=100 parameter may have shaken up your data dashboards, but it hasn’t hurt your SEO. In fact, it’s made your Google Search Console metrics more reliable.

From here on, every impression you see is a clearer picture of how visible your business truly is in the real search world — not just in technical reports.

If you need help understanding how your business should be navigating the changing landscape of SEO and content strategy and AI in digital marketing, book a consultation here.

All the information in this article is correct at the time of writing (October 2025). However, this general guidance and changes are happening all the time so it's important to get the latest advice.