Google’s removal of Num=100 (a small piece of code) recently has had a big impact on the world of SEO, specifically causing SEO reporting disruption. The search giant disabled the ‘num=100’ parameter a function that allowed users and software tools to view 100 search results on a single page. This seemingly minor change has caused major shifts in data for website owners and marketers everywhere.
This article talks about everything to do with Google’s removal of Num=100, what happened, why it matters and what it reveals about the metrics we use to measure SEO success online.
For many years you could add &num=100 to the end of a Google search URL. This would force Google to show 100 results on one page instead of the standard 10. While some researchers used this for convenience its primary users were SEO software companies.
Rank tracking tools from major platforms like Semrush and Ahrefs used this feature to gather huge amounts of data efficiently. By pulling 100 results in a single request they could check website rankings for thousands of keywords quickly and cheaply.
We’ve been seeing the impact of Google’s removal of Num=100 this week (mid-September 2025) and now the software developers of SEO rank tracking tools, I would imagine, are working around the clock to to make ten separate requests to get the same information increasing their costs and causing disruption across the industry.
If you checked your Google Search Console reports after this change you probably noticed two things:
This seems contradictory but it makes perfect sense. The impressions that disappeared were never from real people. They were generated by SEO tools scraping 100 results at a time. If your website ranked at position 78 for a term a tool would record an impression. A human user would almost never scroll that far.
With the bots no longer able to see 100 results at once these artificial impressions vanished. Because these impressions were for very low rankings their removal caused your average position to go up. Clicks and website traffic were likely unaffected because these bots never clicked on the links.
This brings us to a crucial point. Does this change confirm that impressions have always been a meaningless vanity metric? Yes in many ways it does.
The data was never truly accurate in Google Search Console if it was being inflated by bots. The overnight disappearance of millions of impressions with no impact on actual website visits or revenue proves these specific impressions had no value. They were not connected to a potential customer. They were an echo in the system created by the very tools meant to measure performance.
This event highlights a fundamental truth of digital marketing. The metrics that truly matter are those tied to real business outcomes. Clicks and revenue are so important because they represent genuine customer engagement and commercial success. An impression is just an opportunity for a click. If that impression was never seen by a human eye it was not a real opportunity.
This is not to say all impressions are useless. Gaining visibility in front of real users on the first page of Google is of course valuable. But the num=100 change has shown us that a large portion of the impression data we relied on was distorted.
Your SEO reporting should now be cleaner and more honest. The impression numbers you see today are a much better reflection of your true visibility to potential customers. The key takeaway is to focus on the metrics that drive your business forward. Track your clicks your conversion rates and your revenue. This data was always the real measure of success and the removal of num=100 has only made that fact clearer.
Google has not given an official reason. The general view in the SEO industry is that it was done to stop automated tools from easily gathering vast amounts of ranking data. This practice increased costs for Google and also distorted data in Google Search Console. By removing the function the data we see now is cleaner and more accurately reflects what real users see.
Because of Google’s recent change (it’s removal of the Num=100 parameter) you can no longer use this to get 100 results. All searches now return to the standard of around 10 results per page with continuous scroll on many devices.
The num=100 feature was never a reliable indicator of what a real person would see. The vast majority of users never go past the first page of results. The data was mainly used by automated bots so the impressions and ranking positions it generated were not based on genuine human behaviour.
If you’d love to join our team, head to our careers page to find out more.
We actually post useful stuff 😬
Eleven Brindley Place
2 Brunswick Square
Birmingham
B1 2LP
© Accentuate Ltd 2026
