Google Reporting Update: Impressions Decreasing but Overall Position Increasing? The Hidden Opportunity for Your Business 

You will see a decrease in impressions, not because you are receiving less impressions, but because Google is no longer reporting them.

Your clicks should remain the same, as website users will rarely click on a link in position 21+ of search results.

How will Your Business or ROI Be Affected?

Business ROI most likely won’t be affected. This is simply a reporting change. Your website will still be ranking in the same positions as it was previously, but Google is no longer providing the data.

Why has Google Changed Its reporting?

There are a couple of guesses as to why Google have chosen to do this;

• It’s suspected that a lot of these impressions are bots or AI tools crawling websites so this should give a better overview of stats from humans on the internet
• These impressions have little to no impact on your overall clicks anyway. Ranking in position 99 is most likely going to get you 0 clicks.
• Your website stats look better. Without measuring thousands of impressions that don’t result in clicks, you’re seeing fewer impressions but the same amount of clicks giving you a higher click through rate and a higher average ranking position.

It’s not a bad thing, but it is going to look daunting on your reports at first.

What Should Your Business Do Considering This Google Reporting Update

The first thing you need to do is rationalise the decrease in impressions and understand that this is going to happen. Don’t panic and speak to a technical SEO specialist if you want further explanation.

If you are already investing in SEO for your website, continue as beforehand as your content is still being indexed and shown.

If you are not currently investing in SEO, you have a clean slate to start from scratch making this the perfect time to invest into your website and get found online. Contact the team at Bubble and we can provide a full audit of your website and discover new online opportunities with you.

A Deeper Technical Explanation

For those that may want to understand the full reporting change, here is a more technical explanation

The data that Google has begun phasing out or ignoring is the the &num=100 URL parameter. This allowed searchers and tools to display up to 100 results on a single page. In many cases, searches now revert to the default of 10 results per page.

Although Google has made no official statement, numerous SEOs and rank‑tracking tools have observed that this change is coinciding with sharp drops in Search Console impressions (especially on desktop) and corresponding improvements in average position, despite clicks staying largely unchanged.

The most likely reason is that results previously lying in positions 20+, which were visible only when using &num=100, are no longer being counted (or shown) in many metrics. As those deep‑SERP results drop out, overall impression counts fall, and average rankings appear better.

For tools and reporting this means:

• Impressions will decrease (or already have), perhaps dramatically, as fewer low‑visibility positions are registered.
• Average position may improve, even though actual traffic (clicks) remains steady, simply because the low‑ranking results are no longer part of the calculation.

It is important to emphasise that this doesn’t mean your visibility has dropped among real users—only that some of the measurement in visibility (especially beyond page one) has been lost. What used to be a mix of human and automated/data retrieval traffic is now largely limited to what shows within the top results. There’s a good chance that tracking platforms will adapt over time, but this is yet to be seen.

At Bubble, we’re keeping our eyes peeled and our ear to the ground as we’re not sure the update is quite over just yet… we’re watching this space, and we’ll report back to you.