Why Google Search Console Impressions Dropped: September 2025

Around September 10, 2025, website owners observed significant drops in Google Search Console impressions—some experiencing declines of 30-50% or more, particularly on desktop. While average positions appeared to improve, these changes resulted from Google’s removal of a data collection parameter rather than actual ranking shifts.

Google Disables Data Collection Shortcut

Google eliminated the num=100 URL parameter that previously allowed retrieval of 100 search results per request instead of the standard 10. Rank tracking tools like Semrush heavily relied on this feature for efficient data gathering. The removal forced these tools to make 10 separate requests instead of one, increasing infrastructure costs roughly tenfold.

The timing correlated precisely with widespread impression declines in Search Console, suggesting that bot traffic from automated tools had been counted in impression metrics.

GSC Impressions Were Inflated

Analysis by SEO consultant Tyler Gargula examining 319 websites found that 87.7% of sites experienced impression drops following the change. Desktop impressions suffered the largest impact, with mobile impressions affected less significantly.

A health information website we track saw monthly impressions decline from 38,000 to 24,000, while average position improved from 31 to 16, with clicks remaining stable.

Why Google Made This Change

Protecting competitive intelligence: Search results represent substantial R&D investment. Efficient data scraping allows competitors and AI companies unauthorized access to ranking signals.

Fighting AI training data collection: Services like SerpApi reportedly supplied bulk SERP data to ChatGPT and other AI systems. Disabling bulk collection methods creates obstacles for large-scale data harvesting.

Google simultaneously posted a job opening for “Senior Engineering Analyst, Search, Anti-scraper,” explicitly addressing scraper detection and machine learning models to identify abusive patterns.

Improved Average Position Comes Down to Math

The mathematical improvement in average position reflects removal of inflated bot impressions from positions 50-100. When calculating average position by dividing total position values by total impressions, eliminating deep-position bot traffic causes the remaining legitimate impressions from positions 1-20 to dominate the calculation.

What Business Owners Should Monitor

Rather than chasing impression recovery, focus on metrics connecting to revenue:

• Organic clicks: Month-over-month and year-over-year trends in Search Console
• Conversion rates: Track goal completions, form submissions, calls, and purchases via Google Analytics
• Revenue attribution: Monthly and annual revenue from organic search channels
• Landing page performance: Identify which pages drive valuable actions
• Click-through rates: For page-one rankings, measure the percentage of searchers clicking through

Stable or growing clicks despite lower impressions indicates unchanged real-world visibility. Both metrics declining proportionally warrants investigation, though the focus should remain on qualified traffic conversion rather than impression recovery.