Google Broke Rank Tracking – But There’s More to It Than That

Google quietly pulled the plug on the long-standing &num=100 search results API parameter. For years, this was the backbone of how rank tracking tools fetched the top 100 results in one shot. Its deprecation has already thrown rank trackers and SEO dashboards into chaos. But the story doesn’t stop there.

The Alligator Mouth: More Than AI Overviews?

Over the past few months, SEOs have been obsessed with the “alligator mouth” divergence in Google Search Console (GSC) data – impressions rising while clicks dropped. This was thought by most in the industry (my self including) that this was because of increasing impressions in AIO - Google’s AI Overviews.

But fresh evidence suggests something more fundamental: bot traffic and LLM scrapers may be the true culprits.

Google had to act and it did so by killing the ability to scrape a lot in one go. This is more than a headache for many developers and its likely to result in significantly higher costs for rank tracking tools and anyone doing development using Google's API (thanks Google).

Why It Matters

When bots or scraping tools load extended result sets (ie the top 100 instead of top 10), impressions skyrocket. GSC logs an impression whenever a URL is loaded on a results page.

That means automated scrapers skew impression counts dramatically.

The kicker: when Google disabled &num=100, desktop impressions for some sites dropped by hundreds of thousands overnight. Average positions snapped closer to mobile, where scraping isn’t as common.

So yes, those 200K daily “impressions” on desktop? Very possibly scraper traffic – not real human searches.

Rethinking the Narrative

The SEO industry may have been too quick to connect every impression-click gap to AI Overviews. Google itself has pushed back on those studies, and this deprecation hints at deeper motives:

• Cutting off abuse from third-party rank trackers.

• Quietly cleaning up inflated impression data in GSC.

• Challenging the prevailing “AI ate my clicks” narrative.

  
  

The Bottom Line

Google broke rank tracking - but maybe it exposed something bigger. The “great decoupling” of impressions and clicks might not be about AIO stealing attention. It might be about a flood of bots and LLM scrapers warping the numbers we’ve been relying on.

For SEOs, this is a wake-up call: some of the data we thought was gospel may have always been compromised.