Why Your Google Search Console Impressions Dropped in September (and Why It’s Not All Bad News)
If you’ve checked your Google Search Console (GSC) data recently, you may have noticed something strange starting around September 11, 2025.
Across many websites, total impressions and clicks suddenly dropped, yet average position improved dramatically. At first glance, that sounds contradictory. How can rankings look better while visibility seems to fall?
Don’t worry. This isn’t a sign that your SEO efforts suddenly stopped working. In fact, for most sites, this change has more to do with how Google reports data than how your site is actually performing in search results.
Let’s break down what happened, what it means, and how to interpret your data moving forward.
What Happened Around September 11, 2025
Around that date, Google made a behind-the-scenes change that affected Search Console reporting. Specifically, they stopped using a setting called “num=100,” which allowed systems to pull up to 100 search results at a time for analysis.
Many SEO tools (and even parts of Google’s internal data collection) relied on this method to measure impressions, meaning your site could receive “impressions” for queries where it ranked very low (positions 50–100), even though few users ever actually saw those results.
Once Google disabled that behavior:
- Those deep, low-visibility impressions stopped being counted, and
- Your average position improved, since only higher-ranking, more visible queries remain in the dataset.
In other words, Google didn’t suddenly remove your pages from search results, they just stopped counting data for searches where your pages had minimal visibility.
Why This Change Makes “Average Position” Look Better
Think of it like this:
If your business ranked #5 for one keyword but #85 for another, your average position across both might be 45.
Now, if Google stops counting the #85 keyword (because it was never really seen by users), your “average” looks a lot better — even though your top-ranking keyword never moved.
That’s why so many site owners are seeing improved average positions alongside lower impressions and clicks.
Was There Also an Algorithm Update?
Yes, there were algorithm updates happening around this time too, including what some in the SEO community are calling the “Perspective Update.”
This update focused on refining how Google evaluates helpful content and user intent. While it may have caused small ranking shifts for some sites, the pattern most people saw — a sharp impression drop with a simultaneous position improvement — lines up almost perfectly with the reporting change, not the algorithmic one.
So if your site’s traffic from Google Analytics stayed steady, it’s likely this was a data reporting shift, not a visibility problem.
What You Can Do Now
- Compare Search Console with Google Analytics.
If your organic traffic in Analytics hasn’t dropped significantly, your real visibility hasn’t either. GSC just looks different because of how data is being filtered. - Focus on top-performing pages and keywords.
Those are still being counted accurately. The impressions that disappeared were mostly from long-tail, low-impact queries. - Don’t panic — annotate your reports.
Mark September 11, 2025, as a known “reporting change” date in your dashboards. This will help you (and your stakeholders) interpret the data correctly going forward. - Continue optimizing for quality and user intent.
Google’s ongoing updates continue to reward content that’s relevant, authoritative, and genuinely helpful. That’s still the best long-term SEO strategy.
The Bottom Line
If you noticed in GSC:
- Impressions down
- Clicks slightly down
- Average position up
…it’s almost certainly a data reporting change, not an SEO issue.
Think of it as Google cleaning up the data to reflect real, meaningful visibility and the searches where users are actually seeing and interacting with your site.
At TargetMarket, we monitor these updates closely, and we’re here to make sure your reports focus on true visibility and engagement rather than just raw impression counts. That way, you can see exactly how your site is performing where it matters most: in front of real users.
Google’s platform will continue to evolve, but so will we. If you’d like help interpreting changes or planning what’s next for your SEO, we're always just a message away. Together, we’ll keep your digital presence strong.
