Being a Buffalo-based SEO agency, we are constantly involved with Google and monitoring where our clients rank for vital searches. If you’re new to SEO, the goal of SEO is to outrank your competition so that when a potential customer or client searches for a service or product that you provide, ideally, they see your result first, and feel good about your website, brand, and message, and make a choice to call or contact you. This would be known as organic traffic, as it was not an ad, but was found through Google Search. When the user calls or contacts your business, that’s a conversion.
Recently, on September 12, Google made a MAJOR change that is sure to shift SEO marketing, SEO strategy, and SEO reporting. Today, we will break down what happened and what it means for SEO in the near future.
What Happened on September 12?
Google has yet to respond publicly with a statement or update, which is somewhat rare, but what happened is the search engine removed a parameter (&num=100), which allowed a user or SEO data scraping tool to, in 1 search, see a snapshot of the first 10 pages of results, and who ranked where in those results. This would show ranks 1-100.
Now, this change may not seem like a huge deal at first, but when you consider that no one can see this data at a glance, it impacts SEO reporting quite a bit. There are some tools that are still able to provide a few pages of rankings, like SEMRush, which provides the first 20 results, but the majority of SEO reporting tools are now scrambling, as their software is immediately less valuable, in only being able to show results 1-10.
What Does it Mean for Your Rankings?
Well, ultimately, the rankings you held beyond page 1 probably are still there. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the ability to demonstrate upward growth on new keywords will be difficult. Keywords don’t just jump to page 1 overnight, SEO is an ongoing battle, where a keyword may first rank around 50, then move up to 30, then move up to 20, then move up to 6, then move down to 30, then move up to 3, then move down to 40, then move up to 10, so on and so forth.
Our strategy has always been about quality and quantity. The more keywords we can see are moving up over time, the more organic (free) traffic we are getting for a client, and the more likely an increase in conversions. This means (as of now) we will need to rely on Google Search Console and seek additional tools to help measure those rankings beyond 1-10. 1-10 are obviously the most important positions to be, but once again, you don’t just show up there overnight.
Why Did Google Make this Change?
We will await official word from Google, but it can be assumed that this change coincides with AI, and the many different AI platforms that can scrape data for answers, including Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Grok, Perlexity, and other tools. AI-powered content generation tools have been known to aggressively scrape Google search results. They may also be aiming to protect their search infrastructure and provide better reporting data, or at least more accurate data. This is because bots and data scraping using &num=100 create false impressions. This could be something Google changes more publicly after seeing results in the future.
“The X” in Your GSC Data
Without the &num=100 parameter, it’s not only SEO reporting software that can no longer scrape 100 results, but also AI and other bots.
When looking at our own Google Search Console, we demonstrated that 5 out of 6 websites saw a decrease in “total impressions” after 9/12, and 5 out of 5 websites saw an increase in “Average position.” This is due to no more bots scraping, and we will continue to monitor Google Search Console to see how the change affects traffic to the sites.
What Does the Change Mean for Reporting?
This does mean that any keyword that is positioned below 10 will not be able to be demonstrated by 99% of reporting software. We have used SEMRush, Authority Labs, and currently use Serrple for our SEO keyword position tracking, but we will now be tracking to see new tools and tricks to emerge for reporting on keyword position and growth.
What Does the Change Mean for SEO Strategy?
Ultimately, getting your website to page one for conversion-worthy search queries and increasing the number of keywords on page one is still the goal. This takes consistent, quality content, technical SEO skills, patience, and monitoring. Quality content means following Google’s lead on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, and using their EEAT strategy.
The only thing that really changes at this point is where we look at signals.
We want to see your important keywords rising, but now we may need to rely more on Google Search Console for this data, and we don’t have a quick daily glance with Serrple. It remains to be seen if this change is permanent, but it’s also an interesting twist that if you do a Google search now, you’ll also notice there’s a little button to “hide sponsored results” also.
If you have questions about your SEO strategy, we’d love to chat. Just reach out via our contact form or give us a call at the office to speak with someone about your SEO strategy today!