September 10, 2025 Ranking Drops Explained

It’s hard to believe there is so little information about the latest ranking drops in SEO tracking tools, often correlating with the large impression drops in Google Search Console.  For those trying to find answers, we have gathered the information that is currently available. The drop is visible starting around September 10-15, 2025, and it has not yet been addressed by many SEO rank providers.

We know that Google has recently rolled out a spam update, and although your ranking drop during the above time is not related to these changes, there might be a motivation from Google for making an adjustment that’s causing this huge volatility.  Although unconfirmed, the AI scrapers have been relentlessly gathering data from the Google results, and it looks like Google may be putting a stop to it or at least attempting to make the scraping more difficult. As a side result, the rank reporting tools are affected as well and report possibly only page 1 results or not record ranking data at all for any of the keywords.

Drop in Rankings Across all Accounts in Many Rank-Tracking Tools

Google has removed the ability to use the &num=100 parameter.  This simple parameter allowed trackers to pull all 100 results with one request.  Now the same data has to be queried 10x to gather the results for all 100 ranking positions. Some tools used paginations and these may remain unaffected, but from Agency Analytics to Keyword Insights, you will see some concerning data.  What can you do… nothing.  Until your provider changes how they data is being gathered, there is absolutely nothing you can do on an automation reporting side.  You can verify your positioning manually.  This will be a really difficult time for SEO experts who provide monthly reports to their clients as the data presented will not be true or accurate.  You may need to explain this to the client or omit reporting until the data is fixed. Be aware, this will most likely cause an increase in the cost of retrieving the keyword ranking data.

So let’s say we figured why over the course of a few days keyword rankings saw a significant drop across the board.  But what about the Google Search Console data?

Reasons Behind Impression Drops in Google Search Console mid-September 2025

It’s not likely a coincidence that the impressions in GSC dropped significantly at the same time the &num=100 parameter was removed.  When you think about the impression count in GSC, anytime a keyword related results displays your URL it is counted as an impression as long as it is within the first 100 results. This does not mean that the result was actually visible to the user, it just means that it was contained withing the first 10-page result.  The reduction of the bot traffic from SEO and AI tools may be the reason for adjustment of the Search Console data although the volumes seem very significant to account just for that.

So far there has been no official address from Google on this topic and no information regarding bringing the &num=100 parameter has been provided. If this remains unchanged, expect the SEO tools to increase charges for keyword rank tracking.