Digital Shake-up: What Google’s Removal of “num=100” Means for Your SEO.

Between 10 and 12 September 2025, Google removed the num=100 parameter from its search URLs, shaking up the SEO community. In this Digital Shake-up blog, we’ve broken down what this change means for you. 

What is num=100? 

For many years, SEO professionals used the parameter “&num=100” with a Google search URL. One request with “&num=100” would return up to 100 organic results, rather than the default 10. This was useful because SEO tools and scrapers could retrieve large portions of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) with fewer requests. It helped with pulling larger SERPs for competitor monitoring and rank checking. 

What changed? 

In September 2025, Google quietly disabled support for &num=100, effectively removing that shortcut. After the change, only the first 10 results are returned, meaning the one-request approach no longer works or provides the full depth of search results. Because of that, any system or tool that depended on &num=100 now has to shift to making multiple requests (for example, issuing 10 separate requests to get 100 results total). That adds cost and complexity to data collection. 

Why does it matter? 

This change doesn’t affect how Google ranks or presents organic results to users. But it does change how much data is accessible to SEO professionals, SEO tools, and scrapers.

Here are the main impacts of this change: 

1. Third-party rank tracking tools like Semrush and AHREFS will need to make changes to how they track beyond the first page of Google results. 
2. Many people have noticed that impressions, rankings, and keyword visibility in Google Search Console are showing a significant decline after 10 September. 

What does it mean for business owners?

Without the num=100 parameter, rank trackers will need to generate more requests to get the same amount of data, which means that subscription costs for these platforms could increase. 

The bottom line: This makes no direct difference to your ranking, but rather the visibility you get from SEO tools and how the data is presented.

Many businesses and SEO’s are seeing fewer impressions in Google Search Console, which can make your performance look worse. Don’t worry,  it is suspected that the removed impressions are generated by SEO trackers. So, now the data around your impressions is more accurate. Your clicks and conversions are expected to remain unaffected (unless there are other SEO shifts).

However, one long-term consequence is that reporting, benchmarking, and forecasting will become trickier, especially when comparing pre- and post-change data. 

What can you do? 

Here are some tips to help your marketing team and stakeholders adjust:

1. Add a note in your reports to mark mid-September 2025 as the date of change.
2. Expect impressions to be lower. Use data from after the change to establish a fresh baseline to monitor future performance. 
3. Look at the movement over time. A drop in impressions doesn’t necessarily mean that your SEO strategy is failing, especially in the context of this change. 30 day and year-on-year trends will matter more than day-to-day fluctuations.
4. Check whether your SEO services or SERP tools have adapted to this change already.
5. Shift emphasis away from impressions. Instead, prioritise metrics that reflect user behaviour, such as clicks, engagement/session metrics, and conversion completion, which are expected to remain the same.

Final Thoughts

For business owners and marketers, the key thing to remember is this: your real visibility hasn’t been taken away, but the reporting metrics have changed. Keep continuing with best practices for SEO and digital marketing, adapt your reporting methods, and your impression results should stabilise soon. If you want to discuss how to keep your SEO performance stable through this change, contact the team at Pixelstorm.