The other day I wrote about ranking tools breaking after Google changed one tiny parameter. Well, that same change has also caused Google Search Console impression graphs to fall off a cliff, and people are panicking (again).
If you’ve logged into GSC recently and seen your impressions plummet, you’re not alone. But before you start hyperventilating about your SEO strategy, let me explain what’s really happening.
Same Google change, different symptoms
Remember that &num=100 parameter I mentioned in my post about SEO ranking tools stopping working? The one that let you see 100 search results instead of 10, and broke all the ranking tools? Well, it turns out that change had another consequence nobody saw coming.
SEO consultant Brodie Clark was first to spot the connection. When Google disabled this parameter, it didn’t just break ranking tools – it also massively reduced the impression data showing up in Google Search Console.
The timing matches perfectly – he impression drops started on exactly the same day that ranking tools began failing.
Why your GSC impressions have dropped (and why that’s not a bad thing)
This is where it gets interesting. All those ranking tools that were scraping Google’s results using the 100 results parameter were generating impressions every time they checked your rankings. Which means that every time one of your competitors used a tool to search for a phrase you appear for, your Google Search Console registered an impression – even though no-one ever saw your site in the results.
Think about it – if a ranking tool checks where you rank for “website design services,” and you’re in position 95, that still counts as an impression in GSC. Even though no real human would ever scroll down to see your listing. (There’s a reason for the joke “Where’s the best place to hide a dead body? On page 2 of Google”…)
According to Edward Bate’s analysis on LinkedIn, this could explain those cliff-edge drops in Search Console impressions. If a big chunk of your impression data was actually just bots checking your rankings, then breaking those bots would make your impressions disappear overnight.
This discovery has massive implications for something called “The Great Decoupling” – the theory that AI overviews were causing impressions to skyrocket while clicks stayed flat.
For months, SEO experts have been pointing to Search Console graphs showing huge impression spikes coinciding with Google rolling out AI overviews. The theory was that people were getting their answers from AI overviews without clicking through to websites.
But what if those impression spikes weren’t caused by AI overviews at all? What if they were mostly just bot traffic from increasingly sophisticated SEO tools scraping more data?
Brodie Clark’s analysis suggests this might be exactly what happened.
Desktop vs Mobile impact
There’s another clue that supports the bot theory – the impression drops are primarily affecting desktop traffic, with mobile being hit much less.
Most ranking tools default to desktop tracking because that’s what SEO professionals have traditionally focused on. If bot impressions WERE inflating the data, you’d expect to see exactly this pattern – bigger drops in desktop impressions.
What this means for your business
Well, the good news is that your actual traffic probably hasn’t changed at all. This is just Google cleaning up the data to give you a more accurate picture.
If your Google Search Console impressions have dropped but your website traffic and conversions are still steady, that confirms you’re seeing the data clean-up, not a real problem.
This whole situation is a reminder of something I bang on about constantly: focus on business results, not vanity metrics.
Those inflated impression numbers might have looked impressive, but if they were mostly bots, they weren’t helping your business anyway. Better to have accurate data showing 10,000 real impressions than fake data showing 50,000 that includes thousands of bot views.
Instead of obsessing over GSC impressions, focus on:
- Actual website traffic from your analytics
- Conversion rates and leads
- Revenue from organic search
- Click-through rates on real searches
This situation reveals how much junk data was polluting Search Console. For months (years?), businesses have been making decisions based on impression numbers that included massive amounts of bot traffic.
While the graphs look scary right now, this change should eventually give us much cleaner data to work with. No more trying to figure out why impressions are going up but clicks and business results aren’t following.
I have no doubts Google will keep making changes that break our tools and mess with our data. But if you focus on helping real customers find real solutions to real problems, these temporary disruptions won’t matter.
Your Search Console impressions might be lower, but they’re finally showing you what’s actually happening with real people, not bots. And that’s much more useful for growing your business.
