Drop in Google Impressions September 2025

In September 2025 you may have noticed a drop in the number of impressions for your website in Google Search Console. This has somewhat caused a lot of panic amongst website owners and we have been asked the question “Why have my impressions dropped?” multiple times.

These are screenshots from two different websites, both showing a significant drop in impressions around the 13th September 2025. 

This is not cause for concern, this is the same with 87.7% of all websites according to Search Engine Land, so don’t panic if you are also seeing this drop and wondering what's going wrong.

Without any official announcement, Google disabled a long-standing URL parameter, &num=100. This parameter allowed users and third-party tools to request 100 search results on a single page. 

For a long time, the &num=100 parameter served as the backbone of rank-tracking tools, allowing efficient crawling of Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and delivering keyword rankings in batches of 100. With its removal, the process of collecting this data has been fundamentally reshaped.

SEO communities around the world have been discussing how this will affect reporting and tracking.

Source: Reddit

Here is what we know so far:

• Data collection now takes 10x more requests, we may see an increase in prices for SEO tools.

• Rank trackers are adjusting, so we may see some inconsistencies in reporting for a while.

• Data tracking is now more accurate, no more inflated artificial impressions.

Source: LinkedIn

You may be wondering what you need to do, well the answer is simple, nothing drastic. Continue to monitor rankings, impressions and clicks over time. Continue to provide helpful, valuable content for your website users.

When reporting, impressions shouldn’t be a big focus anyway, you should continue to monitor clicks, conversion rates and organic revenue when reporting to clients or company stakeholders.

• Your website hasn’t lost visibility - this is a reporting change, not a ranking drop.

• The September 2025 dip in impressions is linked to Google removing the &num=100 parameter, which many SEO tools relied on.

• Almost 9 out of 10 websites experienced the same trend, so you’re not alone.

• Clicks, traffic, and rankings remain unaffected - the way data is gathered has simply changed.

• Expect some inconsistencies in rank-tracking tools as they adapt to the new system.

• Expect some rising costs for rank tracking and SEO tools.

• Going forward, impression data will be more accurate and less inflated by automated queries.

If you have any questions about the change, please get in touch with Aware Digital and we will be happy to share our knowledge and give you some advice.