In an earlier post, we explored how the ‘great decoupling’ was fracturing the relationship between impressions and clicks on organic Google searches, and how AI has also introduced additional pressures that have disrupted the SERPs. September 2025 changes rolled out by Google has brought further disruption with the dramatic drops in visibility for businesses. If it has happened to you, do not fear, you are in the company of 77% of all websites across the planet!
Earlier in the year, Google’s evolving SERP features – including AI Overviews and zero-click search results – were driving up apparent visibility (impressions) even as click-through rates stagnated or declined. Read our earlier blog on the ‘Great Decoupling’ here for what happened, why it happened and whether you should be worried about it or not? And importantly, what can you do in this changed landscape to recover?
Fast forward to September 2025 and a new shift in the latest Google roll-out has businesses scratching their heads again. If your Google Search Console results very suddenly and very dramatically look like the above image 👆 then read on to find out what’s been going on.
The image below shows how the Great Decoupling presents itself in your Google Search Console account. Impressions are strong, with no change in pace, but the clicks from users fell away dramatically in the Spring of 2025, leaving many SEOs initially puzzled about why this had happened.
Read our earlier blog for a longer explanation, but in short, as a result of featured snippets, AI overviews, voice-prompts, and LLMs such as ChatGPT, there has been a huge rise in no-click searches. The way Google’s search engine interface has accommodated all these features and developments, including the roll out of Google AI Mode to combat the threat posed to Google by Chat GPT has led to a dramatic loss for business owner’s websites.
The main reason for this new shift where you will likely see a dramatic drop in impressions (the purple line in all the illustrations on this page) is due to Google disabling a parameter – specifically the &num=100 parameter.
In layman’s terms, you might be familiar with Google having 10 results on the search pages, and then you click through to pages 2, 3, 4, 5 etc as you explore in more detail. This parameter, when added to the end of your search result query would allow you to see up to 100 results all on one page. This is handy for those who prefer to scroll, scroll, scroll rather than click and wait for the next page to load, however it was also a feature being used by lots of paid-for tools that help businesses with reporting and ranking tracking.
SEO tools that depended on the &num=100 parameter to fetch deeper page results to help them report back to their paying customers will now find their tools no longer work, or will have to be altered in order to fetch back results page by page, rather than all in one go.
An analysis of 319 properties found that 87.7% of sites saw declines in impressions, and 77.6% lost unique ranking keywords around the same time. And SEO practitioner forums are alive with conversation about this too.
All the indications right now show that the issue is largely about reporting differences, not an actual collapse in search visibility. So, you might say that all the bot traffic from SEO tools like AHREFs, SEMRush, BrandWatch etc, have been pushing up your idea of how many impressions your website is getting on Google.co.uk in an artificially inflated way and that this development is merely a ‘reset’.
This calls into question all the discussion that has been circulating amongst SEOs about the ‘Great Decoupling’.
There was very definitely a decline in clicks that are not commensurate with the ‘usual amount’ of impressions and that could be seen very clearly in the Spring of 2025. We can probably still safely attribute the decline in clicks to the rise in no-click searches due to AI, and a behaviour move of many people into ‘ChatGPTing it’ instead of ‘Googling it’ more these days. But SEOs are now re-examining the impressions numbers in light of this new development.
In our opinion, the Decoupling was real, but this double hit on the numbers this year is more a reset button that has been clicked. We just now need to alter our mindsets in the way we do our counting now the data has been cleaned of bots who’ve been scraping the SERPs at huge rates whilst we’ve all been mistaken that these impressions numbers are human beings and prospective clients.
The positive of this ‘reset’ can be clearly seen in the average position numbers also being seen by businesses. For most businesses, they are seeing much healthier average position numbers because the deep-SERP impression results were dragging down the overall average for your website. So fewer low-rank impressions are now being counted, which allows the more visible pages on your website to show a truer position, without the noise of all the longer-tail (and sometimes quite frankly bizarre) phrases that your website was scoring for before.
This proves to be a further lesson in not paying too close attention to vanity metrics. What really matters is the ker-ching in your bank account, so let’s all acknowledge this new development and move on with running our businesses again.
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