What Happened to My Website Analytics Data in September?

How Shutting Off the NUM=100 Parameter Has Changed Reporting Keyword Rankings and Impressions

From September 9–14, 2025 Google implemented a change in how search results can be “scraped” by tools that provide reporting on organic keyword rankings. The use of a special parameter, NUM=100, was no longer allowed. This parameter had been used as a one step process for bots to gather ranking data for 100 positions in Google organic search. This change has had several noticeable effects.

Tools that report average position show sudden improvements in rankings after September 14th, but no improvement in clicks. The use of this parameter made it the default to include rankings as far down as position 100 into the overall average. This would drag down the reported average position for many queries. Since this is no longer the default behavior for reporting, most tools do not now include these rankings that would almost never be seen by a human searcher, as it would be more difficult and possibly costly to do so. These largely-useless rankings are no longer calculated into the average position that is reported, so the average appears to have significantly improved. There is no real difference in actual, useful rankings, but the data now more accurately reflects the real search experience.

Total search impressions seem to have declined since 9/14. Google counts an impression in search when a user scrolls through enough of the search results to see the organic result for that web page. The use of the NUM=100 parameter caused impressions to be recorded as though a user had actually scrolled through all 100 results. Human users rarely scroll that far, so the number of overall impressions was being inflated by bot traffic using the NUM=100 parameter. Discontinuing its use now gives a more accurate, although still slightly inflated, count of impressions. Real impressions by humans did not suddenly decline in mid September as reporting tools may show.

This change is actually better for measuring real results. While it has made life a bit more difficult for software platforms that report on keyword rankings, this change actually provides a more realistic picture of rankings that a human might see. The previous data (before Sept 9th) was being skewed by bot traffic using the NUM=100 parameter. Going forward, we have more accurate data to guide our marketing efforts.