How We’re Solving Google’s Top 100 Rank Tracking Crisis: And What It Means for Our Industry

On September 13, 2025, Google made a seemingly small change that sent shockwaves through the SEO industry.

The removal of the 100 results per page option (“num=100” search parameter) from their search systems has fundamentally altered how rank tracking works, creating what many are calling the biggest infrastructure challenge the SEO industry has faced in years.

What Changed and Why It Matters

For years, SEO platforms could retrieve the top 100 search results in a single request by adding &num=100 to Google search URLs. This simple parameter allowed us to efficiently track keyword rankings across all positions that matter for SEO strategy.

Google’s removal of this parameter forces all data providers to use pagination – requesting 10 results at a time, across 10 separate pages, to get the same 100 results we used to get in one request. This seemingly simple change has massive implications:

• Infrastructure costs increase by up to 10x due to the volume of additional requests
• Data collection speeds slow down significantly.
• Reliability challenges emerge as the 10 pages need to be collected and handled for each request.

Our Solution

The Strategic Insight:

Not all ranking positions really need daily updates – top 20 drives SEO performance, while top 100 drives prioritization:

• Daily top 20 keeps the SEO KPIs frequent enough to spot issues and correlate performance with events
• Weekly top 100 provides sufficient strategic insights for positions 21-100 without breaking budgets

The SEOmonitor Approach: Innovation Over Compromise

Within 24 hours of Google’s announcement, our engineering team adapted the tracking to ensure data reliability and accuracy and made some smart trade-offs:

• Daily top 20 updates (both devices): Visibility metric unaffected
• Weekly top 100 updates: optimal frequency for positions 21-100
• Zero price impact: we’re absorbing infrastructure costs
• Complete initial keyword analysis: full 100 results where it matters most

What’s Next: Leading the AI Search Era

While we were solving the top 100 tracking challenge, we weren’t just maintaining the past – we were building the future.

This week, we’re launching Advanced AI Overview Tracking, included at no additional cost for all existing customers.

Our new daily AI Overview tracking provides comprehensive insights into how your content performs in the age of AI-powered search:

• Full AI Response Capture: See the complete AI-generated response and full source list (“show more” clicked)
• Daily updates on both devices
• Two key performance metrics:
• Brand Mention Tracking: Monitor when your brand is mentioned in AI responses
• Website Citation Monitoring: See when your website is included as a source
• Reliable group-level metrics weighted by search volume