If you opened Google Search Console this week and got a small heart attack, you're not alone.
Impressions, the number of times your site shows up in someone's search results, have fallen off a cliff. Not a gentle slide. A vertical drop, dated to around September 11th or 12th, with no warning and no explanation. Desktop numbers are taking the worst of it.
Meanwhile, two other numbers are doing something confusing. Average position has improved. Click-through rate has gone up. And clicks, actual humans arriving on your site, haven't budged.
Here's what's going on, and why you should not panic about it.
The one-line explanation
Google turned off a setting called num=100, and a large share of the "impressions" you'd been seeing were never people. They were software.
That's it. Your rankings didn't collapse. You weren't penalized. A chunk of inflated numbers has evaporated, and what's left underneath is closer to the truth.
The details are worth a few minutes, though, because they explain why the other numbers moved the way they did.
What num=100 actually was
For years, you could add &num=100 to the end of a Google search URL and get 100 results on one page instead of the usual 10.
Almost nobody did this by hand. But every SEO tool on the market did it constantly. If a rank tracking tool needs to know where your site sits for "roof repair Bellingham," the cheapest way to find out is to pull 100 results in one request and look for you in the list. One request, one answer.
On September 11, 2025, Google switched it off. No announcement, no blog post. It simply stopped working.
Why that broke the tools
Without that parameter, a tool that wants the top 100 results has to page through them ten at a time. Ten requests instead of one, for every keyword, for every client, every day.
Costs went up around tenfold overnight.
- Data gaps. Some rank trackers can't currently gather complete results. Reports are coming back thin or missing. Semrush and others have acknowledged the problem and are shipping workarounds.
- Slower reports. Ten times the requests means longer collection cycles.
- Less depth. Several providers are expected to reduce how deep they track, to top 50 or top 20 instead of top 100, because tracking to 100 has stopped being worth the cost.
That last one has a real consequence for smaller businesses, and we'll come back to it.
Now the Search Console part: the confusing bit
Here's the piece making everyone panic.
Search Console counts an impression when your page appears in someone's search results. But it hasn't been distinguishing carefully between a person scrolling a results page and a tool pulling 100 results in one go.
So every time a rank tracker requested 100 results for a keyword, every site in positions 11 through 100 got logged an impression. Nobody looked at any of them. Multiply that across every SEO tool, every keyword, every day, for years.
Now that num=100 is gone, that entire layer of phantom impressions has vanished with it. Which produces exactly the pattern you're seeing:
| Impressions | Sharp drop, ~Sept 10–12 | Bot-driven impressions have stopped being logged |
| Average position | Improving (lower number) | The positions being removed were mostly deep ones (40th, 70th, 90th) that had been dragging the average down |
| Clicks | Essentially unchanged | Bots never clicked anything. Real people keep behaving normally |
| Click-through rate | Going up | Same clicks divided by fewer impressions |
Desktop is hit hardest because that's where the automated requests were coming from.
If your chart shows impressions falling and average position rising in a near-mirror image, starting on the same day, that's this. It's one of the cleanest signatures in analytics.
Why this hits small businesses harder
Large companies have in-house analysts who spotted the cause within a day. Smaller businesses mostly don't, and that's where the real damage happens: not in the data, but in the decisions made because of it.
The budget mistake. The risk is a business owner seeing impressions crater, concluding SEO has stopped working, and shifting money into paid ads to compensate. Organic search is performing exactly as well as it was last week. Only the measurements changed; the rankings didn’t.
Rising tool and agency costs. Data collection just got ten times more expensive, and that cost lands somewhere. Some businesses will end up downgrading to cheaper tools with thinner data. It is worth asking what your SEO services actually report on, and whether those reports still tell you anything you can act on.
Less competitive visibility. This is the one with the longest tail. As providers cut tracking depth from 100 to 50 or 20, everyone loses the ability to easily see what's happening below the first couple of pages, where long-tail keyword opportunities live, and where new competitors show up before they're a problem. That visibility is about to get more expensive to buy.
The overcorrection. Some businesses will respond by focusing exclusively on the top 10. Understandable, since that's where clicks are. But "position 34 for a long-tail phrase" is often a page that's two solid improvements away from earning traffic, usually a clearer offer and a faster, better-structured page design. Stop looking below the fold and you stop finding those.
What to do about it
Don't act on the drop. Nothing about your site has changed. If you were about to move budget, pause and look at clicks and conversions instead. Those are intact.
Make a note of the date. From here on, any year-over-year impressions comparison that spans September 2025 is comparing two different measurement systems. When you look at this month next September, the drop won't be real. Clicks and conversions are the honest comparison across that line.
Your numbers just got better. It looks like fewer impressions, but the ones you have reflect actual humans. Your click-through rate is now a real number, not one full of robots. That's an upgrade, even though it looks like a loss.
Watch the right metrics. Impressions and average position are useful for overall patterns. I like to call them Vanity Metrics. They are not the scoreboard, and they're increasingly subject to changes in how Google counts rather than changes in how you're actually performing. The numbers that hold steady through all of this are the ones that come from your own business: calls, form fills, booked jobs, revenue from organic search.
If your reports have ever left you with a knot in your stomach and no explanation, that's a reporting problem, not a search problem, and it's a fixable one.
Not sure what your Search Console data is telling you? We're in the Sycamore Building in Fairhaven, and we're happy to look at your numbers with you and tell you plainly what's signal and what's noise. Get in touch, or read more about our SEO services and web design work.
