If you’ve noticed some strange (and slightly scary) things happening in your ranking reports lately, you’re not imagining things. Google is testing the removal of the &num=100 parameter – the setting that lets us (and the tools we use) pull 100 results on a single search page.

It sounds small, but this tweak has already had a knock-on effect across the SEO world. Tools are breaking, reports are looking off, and some metrics aren’t adding up how they used to. Let’s unpack what’s happening and how you can explain it to clients or colleagues without setting off alarm bells.

What Google’s &num=100 parameter change means for SEOs

The short version: Google seems to be phasing out the ability to grab 100 results at once. Sometimes the parameter still works, sometimes it doesn’t, and whether you’re signed into Google may even play a role.

Because most third-party SEO tools lean on this parameter to collect rankings in bulk, they’re suddenly coming up short. A few platforms are already limiting their results to the top 20 or 30, while others are spitting out gaps or errors.

And the ripple effect is that reports that used to give a nice, clean view of top 100 positions are now showing strange dips, especially in desktop impressions, and shifts in average position. These changes don’t necessarily mean rankings have tanked, but they do mean we have to tread carefully when reading the data.

Why ranking reports and SEO dashboards may look wrong

Here’s the tricky part: when you’re showing performance reports to a client or stakeholder, these quirks can look like real declines. That’s the last thing you want when your job is to show progress.

Data beyond page two or three is now much less reliable. Some automated dashboards are suddenly less trustworthy. Even Google Search Console has felt a bit unstable since around 11 September 2025, which only adds fuel to the fire.

A timeline of why SEO reporting feels messy right now

• Early 2025 – AI Overviews keep expanding

Google has been steadily rolling out AI Overviews to more queries. These AI-generated summaries answer questions directly in the SERPs, which means more zero-click searches and less traffic flowing through to websites, even when those sites are still technically ranking.

• Mid-2025 – AI Mode launches in search

Google introduces AI Mode, giving users a more conversational, context-aware search experience. People can ask follow-up questions and get answers generated on the fly. For SEOs, this makes rankings less straightforward, because the search journey looks very different from traditional “10 blue links.”

• 26 August 2025 – Spam update rolls out

Google kicks off its August 2025 spam update worldwide. As usual, rankings start to shake, and many sites notice shifts in impressions across both desktop and mobile.

• Early September 2025 – Reporting starts to wobble

Not long after the spam update, SEOs begin spotting drops in impressions and jumps in average position. At first, it looked like real performance issues, but it quickly became clear that the reporting data itself was unstable.

• 11 September 2025 – The &num=100 parameter test

Google starts testing the removal of the &num=100 parameter, which allowed tools to pull 100 search results on a single page. This test immediately breaks or limits many rank-tracking tools, making reports for deeper positions unreliable.

So while your SEO work might be chugging along just fine, the story your tools are telling could seem very different. This is exactly the kind of situation where clear communication makes all the difference.

How you can adapt reporting and client conversations

First, don’t panic. Focus on what you can control. Keep an eye on whether Google makes this change permanent, and test your rank tracking tools so you know exactly how they’re handling the shift.

When it comes to reporting, lean harder on the most reliable data – that would be the top 10 to 20 results. That’s where the real traffic comes from anyway. If you need deeper analysis, you may have to gather data across multiple pages instead of relying on the old 100-result view.

Most importantly, get ahead of the questions, whether they’re coming from internal stakeholders or external clients. Add context to your reports, explain that sudden drops or odd position shifts are more likely to be data quirks than performance issues, and equip yourself and your team with talking points so they feel confident explaining it too. Transparency now will save you a lot of headaches later.

What you can do right now:

• Test how your rank tracking tools are handling the change
• Put more focus on the top 10–20 results in reporting
• Add context in reports to explain anomalies
• Prep your client/stakeholder comms
• Keep an eye on whether Google makes this change permanent

The bottom line for SEO

Google’s experiment with the &num=100 parameter is a reminder that we don’t control the playing field – we adapt to it. Yes, it’s frustrating when tools wobble and metrics look off, but it’s also a chance to show clients and colleagues that you understand the landscape and know how to navigate it.

At the end of the day, our job isn’t just to chase rankings, it’s to build trust and explain these changes clearly. Showing that you know what you’re doing about them also goes a long way.

If you want to dig deeper into the details, check out this write-up from Search Engine Roundtable.

Last week, myself and Lisa, one of our Content Executives, took a jump without a parachute into the whirlwind that is BrightonSEO. And oh boy, was it an experience. Get ready for a peek into the talks, both good and bad, and maybe even a few unexpected takeaways from the UK’s biggest search marketing conference.

The key takeaways

1. AI is certainly making its mark on the industry, and some are using it more responsibly than others…
2. Traffic is down across the board, and a lot of that may be due to AI Overviews and GA4’s unruliness.
3. Despite much shoulder shrugging and attempts to wrangle LLM and AI Overview data, the future of SEO is still unknown. The people whose talks were most effective weren’t trying to guess what Google could want—they were making their foundations as solid as possible to weather whatever storm comes our way.
   
   

Session highlights – a deeper dive

BrightonSEO has long been hailed as THE digital marketing conference to attend if you want to learn new tricks, get in-depth data insights, and get a glimpse into the future of SEO. While there were nearly a hundred talks to attend this year, there were undoubtedly some highlights:

Emily Barrington – Leveraging competitor research to accelerate success

Emily, owner of her own agency, Barrington SEO, had the number one talk of BrightonSEO (in my humble opinion). I have three pages of scrawled notes as I tried to keep up with the insane amount of advice and tactics she shared on conducting competitor analysis. From how to reverse engineer a competitor’s SEO tactics (hint: it’s not just keyword analysis!) to capitalising on gaps in their strategy, this talk was outstanding for its efficiency, abundance of practical advice, and genuine knowledge of the industry. 

Colette Masso Del Llano – Is AI having a negative effect on your customer trust?

This main stage talk was really enlightening as a Content Manager and strategist for Fusion. How we use AI is changing so much, and how we, as an external agency, can build trust with our clients is paramount to maintaining our strong relationships. One of Collette’s most shocking (but affirming) stats in her talk was that 72% of people said they would have a negative view of a brand if they thought they had used AI to write their content. Here at Fusion, all of our content is human-written and human-proofed. While the multitude of talks on how to scale content using AI concerned me, this talk helped me remember that just because the crowd are going one way doesn’t mean that they should. 

Marco Giordano – How to do content auditing with SEO/web data for small & big websites

We have a real mix of clients here at Fusion, from local brands with only a handful of main landing pages to industry-leading giants with thousands of pages on site. This talk was extremely helpful in identifying how you should differ your tactics for auditing between big and small businesses, from internal linking structures to the seasonality of content. Marco also had an exceptional number of handy graphs and charts, which you can find in his BrightonSEO slides. 

Rana Abu Quba Chamsi – Mastering cross-platform content strategy

Even before the full schedule for BrightonSEO 2025 was announced, I had seen Rana’s talk title and was instantly intrigued. Cross and multi-channel strategies are crucial to the growth of a client, and so I was pretty excited to see how Rana was going to bring together onsite content and organic social media to create some magic. She didn’t disappoint! 

I was particularly intrigued by her advice to repurpose your workflow, something that we have tried with different clients who manage multiple agencies and found tricky in the past. By starting with onsite content at the core of things (e.g. videos, blog posts, podcasts) and using these as jumping off points for different social formats, you can completely change the way you work, and bring in so much more efficiency when it comes to reporting and analsying too. 

Navigating misguided AI and SEO practices

However, not everything was as excellent as these highlighted talks – the elephant that seemed to be squeezed into every room in Brighton was the misuse of AI, and the promotion of some bad SEO habits that I never would have expected. 

Faking E-E-A-T

One presentation, in particular, suggested a “fake it ’til you make it” approach to E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). While I understand the idea of strategically highlighting your strengths, the concept of faking trust just doesn’t sit right with me.

E-E-A-T is a framework that Google introduced back in 2014 (this is when the emphasis on E-A-T became more prominent in their Search Quality Rater Guidelines, with the ‘Experience’ element being added later) to encourage website owners to create content for their sites that genuinely improves the trustworthiness of their brand. If Google could identify that you were genuine, with real experts in the field, a solid knowledge base, and lots of experience working within an industry or with a type of product, then they were more likely to prioritise your content in SERPs. 

For me, genuine trust isn’t something you can manufacture with quick fixes. Think of it this way: you can’t suddenly claim to be a medical expert by just throwing around jargon or citing a few studies. Real expertise comes from years of study, practical experience, and ideally, recognised credentials. It’s the difference between a blog post mentioning a health condition and one written by a practising doctor sharing insights from their clinical work.

This isn’t about being the loudest or most boastful – it’s about consistently providing well-researched, accurate, and insightful information. It’s about demonstrating a deep understanding of a topic through the quality of your content and your engagement with your audience. 

Ultimately, both your audience and search engines are becoming increasingly sophisticated at recognising the difference between genuine authority and superficial claims (another great BrightonSEO talk by Giulia Panozzo if you’re interested). Building that real expertise, sharing those authentic experiences, and letting those knowledgeable voices lead your content is the best long-term strategy for building lasting trust and achieving sustainable success.

Using AI for everything (and neglecting your proofing)

I was also quite disappointed to hear so many talks advocating for AI-written content, especially AI content written at scale. One BrightonSEO speaker boasted about having already written 250,000 landing pages this year, with his agency set to have written 1 million by the end of 2025. Another, quite senior, member of another agency advocated using AI to produce content at scale without even taking the time to have a human proof it, because their interpretation of Google’s guidelines on AI content is that as long as it’s helpful, it doesn’t need to be well-written. 

I was honestly shocked at the admissions coming from senior digital marketers on one of the biggest platforms that can be provided in our industry. While AI can be a real time saver for some of the more mundane internal tasks that none of us like to do – summarising a very long client email, or picking out the main actions from a recorded meeting – using AI to write content en masse is only going to contribute to the insane volume of AI slop out there online. Gartner predicts that by 2030, 90% of all online content could be AI-generated.

Proofing might be one of the most tedious jobs out there for writers and strategists alike, but there isn’t a single AI tool out there that will be able to interpret the nuance of human communication like a person can. Sure, it can tell you if you spelt onomatopoeia wrong, or if you’ve written something with a low Flesch reading score, but can AI really create the kind of content that builds a connection with other people?

Why does all of this matter for you?

Whether you’re an in-house marketer, working in an agency or purely client-side, it’s essential to know what’s happening in the search landscape and how digital marketers are changing their tactics to keep up. 

While I didn’t agree with some of the tactics and approaches being promoted at BrightonSEO this year, it’s still really important to be aware of their popularity and how other marketers are planning on tackling different issues. Problems such as low traffic, the problematic introduction of ‘GEO’ (Generative Engine Optimisation – essentially how you optimise your content to appear in AI Overviews on Google) and decreased clicks were all addressed in a variety of ways. I’d highly advise getting access to the recorded talks so you can watch through and find the advice that works for you. 

Not only should you be paying attention to what the industry is doing so you can find ways to implement their helpful tips, but also analyse their advice with critical thinking to make sure that their approaches align not only with your marketing goals and ambitions, but with your moral compass too. Not every approach is going to be 100% ethical (or even lawful, as we saw), so make sure you take every talk’s advice with a pinch of salt – your SEO strategy should be tailored to you and your brand, something that Fusion excels at.

We never take a blanket approach to content strategy, SEO strategy, or any creative work. We strive to ensure that every client’s needs and goals are met through our combined research and technical skills, our experience with a huge variety of industries, and most importantly, our genuine care for our clients. Check out our services if you’d like to find out more, or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn to chat about all things content strategy. Until next year, Brighton!