Why there was a sharp drop in GSC screenings

Actually, the story is expected and extremely instructive. If your GSC shows on the desktop dropped sharply around September 9-10, and the average position went up - don't panic and look for filters. You just started to see a more realistic picture.

Let's break down this little technical detail that deflated your stats bubble.

So, many of you have noticed an interesting anomaly in Google Search Console: starting around September 10, desktop displays went down. The reason is simple: Google started disabling the &num=100 URL parameter, which allowed you to get 100 results per query.

What would seem to be the connection? Direct. This parameter was the basis for 99% of all services for position capture and other SERP parsers. And it is they who have been stealthily baiting you with empty displays for years.

How it worked:

Hundreds of position checking services, to save resources, made a single query to Google with &num=100. If your site was, say, on the 55th position, the GSC counted the display for your site on this query. Whereas the real fellow (visitor) to the 5th page of the output usually does not get to the 5th page. This inflated the number of impressions in the console.

Now that the shop has been shut down, parsers have to make 10 queries for 10 results to find your 55th position. And not everyone gets to your position in the results.

Conclusions:

• For most ranking sites, desktop impressions over the past year have been a lie, to say the least. The growth in impressions without click growth, which many wrote off as AI Overviews, was actually largely due to hordes of parsers from SEO and AI tools. Now you're seeing more honest, «bot-cleaned» stats.
• Revise your KPIs and reports. Comparing desktop shows «September to August» or «year to year» is now incorrect. Your new baseline (baseline) is the data after September 10-12. Warn clients and management that the drop is not a site sag, but a correction of metrics by Google.
• The future of SEO tools is in question. This is not just a technical change. For position capture services, it means a tenfold increase in the cost of infrastructure. Get ready for subscription prices to rise, check frequency to decrease, or some tools to die out completely. Real-time rank-tracking is becoming an unaffordable luxury.

So don't panic about the graphs dropping. It's just that your data has become more honest. And honesty sometimes has to be paid for by the appearance of beautiful but bluff numbers in reports.