A few days ago, we told you how a small change by Google was causing an SEO earthquake worldwide. If you own a website or work in digital marketing, you've likely noticed something strange in recent days: a sharp drop in your website's impressions in Google Search Console. A recent study confirms that this hasn't just happened to you. A strange disappearance affecting Search Console Let's recap: for years, major SEO tools have used a parameter in URLs (&num=100) to crawl and monitor up to 100 search results on a single page (remember that, by default, Google only shows the first 10 organic results for a query before requiring you to go to the next page of results). As confirmed by leading industry players like Semrush, this allowed them to collect data on thousands of keywords quickly and efficiently. However, Google has disabled this feature, forcing these tools to revert to the traditional method, which requires multiple requests to obtain the same information. The most notable consequence has been a massive drop in impressions recorded in Search Console starting on September 13. The prevailing theory in the industry is that a large portion of these impressions did not come from real users, but from the bots of SEO tools, which scrape the web. Every time one of these tools crawled a page with 100 results, it generated an artificial impression, even for very low positions that a human user would likely never see. The result? Impression data was artificially inflated. Now, these tools can't perform that type of crawling (at least not so easily), and therefore, impressions for each website have dropped, especially affecting impressions for keywords in positions below the top ten. A large-scale study confirms the significant drop in impressions SEO specialist Tyler Gargula, technical director of Locomotive Agency, has published a study on his LinkedIn profile that leaves no doubt about this. After analyzing 319 properties in Google Search Console and comparing their performance before and after September 13, the findings confirm the massive impact of this Google change. The main takeaway is that the drop in impressions was, as we suspected, widespread. The study reveals that 87.7% of websites experienced a decline in impressions after Google disabled the parameter. Furthermore, 77.6% of the sites suffered a reduction in the number of unique keywords for which they appeared in search results. Gargula suggests that this is because, without the activity of SEO tool bots, pages no longer receive that extra boost in impressions for niche or less competitive keywords. In fact, the drop in impressions was particularly noticeable for short-tail and medium-tail keywords, which are the most popular and those that SEO tools tracked most frequently. The most revealing finding is that the study detected a reduction in keywords ranking on pages 3 and beyond in the search results (i.e., beyond the top 20 positions), while the number of keywords in the first page and top 3 positions increased. This suggests that GSC data now more accurately reflects a website's true ranking, eliminating the noise generated by bots and making the information more useful for decision-making. This also aligns with statements made by tools like Semrush and Accurank, which had previously indicated that their results were unreliable or required additional tracking fees beyond the top 20 positions. For now, Google has yet to provide an official explanation for what happened, beyond confirming that they no longer support searches with the &num=100 parameter.