Whether you’ve been reading SEO news, seen sudden changes in your search console dashboard, or opened your favorite rank tracker to discover it’s not working or misreporting, you’ve probably noticed there’s something up.
Google has removed the ability to view 100 search results per page. This was done by adding the parameter “&num=100” to the URL.
It’s not confirmed whether this is a bug or a new feature right now, but you do need to be aware of the implications.
As you can see from this query for ‘coffee near me’, where filter is set to num=100, you don’t get 100 results.
What does this actually mean?
For Google users, this simply allowed you to view 100 results per page, which, while useful, isn’t necessarily an issue.
For businesses that rely on Google Search Console, you’ll likely notice a drastic drop in impressions.
Source: Brodie Clark
For rank tracking tools, this presents a problem, too.
- Any rank tracking tool that reports on data above the top 10 results will have been affected.
- You may have seen a jump in average rank due to this.
- This means that to get 100 results for a rank tracker, they’d need to make 10 requests rather than 1.
There is a chance that this has happened due to LLMs scraping search results, but Google hasn’t confirmed anything as of right now.
How does that affect you?
While things are being ironed out, your reports may look a little different. This is the case whether you use Search Console or any number of local rank trackers.
In reality, though:
- Actual rankings are unaffected.
- Some tools are pivoting on the number of results they are reporting on.
- Top 10 rankings will still be returned by most tools, and these are the most valuable to report on, regardless.
- The top 20 are still available for most tracking tools. These are where your opportunities often are.
- Anything outside the top 20 often drives minimal clicks or impressions and sees significant flux. Not being able to track keywords that rank here is not the end of the world.
- Local Pack rank tracking will not have been affected.
What is BrightLocal doing?
At BrightLocal, we offer two local rank tracking solutions. Only one of these has been affected.
- Local Search Grid: Our geo-grid rank tracker has not been affected by this change.
- Local Rank Tracker: Our local rank tracker provides the top 50 results, which means it has been affected by the change.
What is the plan for Local Rank Tracker?
To get 50 results for Local Rank Tracker, we now need to run 5 requests instead of one.
We have rolled out a temporary fix to make sure we will continue to provide you with the data we previously offered.
We will monitor the situation and, if anything changes, inform you of any effect this could have on our API and Local Rank tracker.
If you have any questions, please reach out to your account manager or contact customer support.
Contents
Put your rankings on the map
Get a complete picture of your local ranking performance with Local Search Grid.
