11/12/2025
When you logged into Google Search Console since the second week of September you likely saw a big drop in impressions or a sudden “improvement” in average position. Your thinking WTH happened to my rankings? Well they probably didn’t fall. What changed is how Google counts and reports visibility.
Up until then, many SEO tools used the “num=100” parameter to pull the top 100 search results in one request.
In September 2025 Google quietly disabled that parameter. So, fewer deep result pages being loaded, fewer artificial impressions from bots scraping data, and slimmer visibility numbers especially for results ranked on pages 4, 5, 6+ where virtually no real users roam, or...ROM.
The key takeaway: Your real audience visibility likely didn’t change simply your reporting baseline did.
What changes did we make?
1.) Focus on the number of keywords ranking in positions 1-10, and the actual conversions those terms are driving.
2.) Ensure content clusters are built around intent, entity clarity, and proof, not just long tail keyword stuffing.
3.) We annotated September 2025 as a new baseline for Search Console data.
If your dashboards look weird, let’s talk.
