SEO News: Why Your Google Impressions Dropped Overnight — And Why It’s Not Bad News
September 26th 2025
If you opened Google Search Console in mid-September 2025 and saw your impressions fall off a cliff, you’re not alone. Many business owners panicked, wondering if rankings had collapsed. In many cases, the sudden drop is not a problem with your site — it’s the result of Google changing how impressions are counted, removing inflated numbers that never reflected real customer searches. Here’s what happened, why your clicks and traffic are stable, and what this means for your SEO reports.
What Changed in September 2025
Normally, Google only shows about 10 results on each search results page. For years, there was a little-known option that could force Google to display up to 100 results on a single page. SEO professionals or automated tools could trigger it by typing a special setting — &num=100 — into the search URL.
In mid-September 2025, Google stopped supporting that option. Search results are now delivered only in the smaller batches of 10 that real users actually see. This adjustment removed a source of inflated reporting that had been in place for years.
Why Impressions Dropped but Clicks Didn’t
Impressions in Search Console count whenever your page appears in search results, even if no one scrolls far enough to see it. When automated search tools loaded the top 100 results, your page at position 65 counted as an impression. Now those artificial impressions are gone — they suddenly disappeared as soon as Google stopped supporting the &num=100 parameter.
Clicks, however, are different. They only happen when a real person chooses your page in search results. Since users rarely click on results buried on page 6 or 7, removing those artificial impressions that only automated tools were seeing does not affect actual clicks.
That’s why you see:
- A sudden drop in impressions
- Higher average position
- No change in clicks or real traffic
What This Means for Your SEO Reports
If you’ve seen sudden drops in impressions in September without any loss in traffic, this is why. Your site didn’t lose visibility among real users — reporting artifacts simply disappeared.
For site owners and marketers, it’s important to:
- Focus on clicks and conversions, not raw impressions.
- Expect shifts in average position metrics.
- Recognize this as a reporting correction, not a ranking penalty.
Our Take at SilverServers
At SilverServers, we see this as a positive adjustment. It removes noise from Search Console reporting and better aligns the numbers with reality. While impressions may look smaller, they now reflect a more accurate picture of real search visibility.
We’ll continue to watch how this affects tools and reporting, but for most businesses, the key takeaway is simple: your rankings and traffic haven’t dropped — the data just got cleaner.
If you have SEO questions, contact our team or check out the SEO tips section of our blog.
