Google breaks keyword tracking and ChatGPT may be less important than we think  – SEO News September 2025

It was an action-packed month of September for SEO news. A lot of it seemed to stem from Google’s decision to stop supporting a feature that let users get 100 results per page rather than 10. This change meant that some keyword tracking tools struggled to maintain reporting for the top 100 positions. SEOPress Insights keyword tracking, however, continued to work perfectly throughout it all. SEOPress Insights users will find it a reliable tool for assessing damage from the Google August Spam Update that finally finished rolling out late September. Other news suggested that the future of search is without any blue links. This could be AI-generated responses from Google in AI Mode or the increasing popularity of ChatGPT as a search tool.

September 10th – Google removed num=100 parameter

This small change made by Google on September 10th is not an algorithm update. It did not affect your ranking in Google, but it may have an important impact on how you track SEO performance.

From September 10th, Google removed a feature (the num=100 parameter) that allowed users to get a results page with 100 blue links rather than 10. It is not likely that many humans used this feature, but SERP tracking tools and other bots (including AI tools) appear to have relied on it to get data from Google.

Once the 100-link page disappeared, tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs started to have problems reporting on ranking for clients. The SEMRush Sensor, for example, shows a glitch from September 10th to September 17th because data was unavailable.

Note that SEOPress Insights does not rely on num=100 pages to track ranking and it was unaffected by the update.

In the days following this change, SEOs and site owners started to see radical differences to Google Search Console data too. Impressions were notably down, and sites were visible for less keywords. You may have noticed this change in WordPress if you sync your Search Console data using SEOPress PRO.

If your Google Search Console is showing a drop in impressions from around September 10th, you are seeing the effect of Google removing access to the 100-link pages. Before September 10^th, data reported by Google was inaccurate because ranking tools and other bots were creating false impressions for keywords.

September 16th – Improvements to ChatGPT Search

After last month’s release of GPT5, we said you should start following traffic from ChatGPT in Google Analytics or other traffic monitoring tools.

On September 16th, OpenAI announced another update, this time to ChatGPT’s web search feature specifically. In their release notes, they say “We’ve made further improvements to search in ChatGPT, making results more accurate, reliable, and useful”. Again, it may be interesting to check your traffic from the date of this update. Research published by ranking tool Sistrix says that ChatGPT is making less web searches (and potentially sending less traffic) since it released this update.

Although research released by OpenAI reports that 21.3% of ChatGPT prompts are informational searches, Rand Fishkin has calculated that this computes to “only” 66.5 million web searches per day Worldwide. This figure is dwarfed by Google’s 14 billion searches every day.

Rand also draws data from chatgpt-vs-google.com (this site correlates traffic data from over 50,000 websites) that shows that only 0.21% of website traffic currently comes from ChatGPT, compared to 41.13% from Google. His conclusion is that marketers should be very wary of dedicating time and money to optimization for AI tools despite the subject being heavily promoted by agencies looking for budgets. Instead, “prioritize marketing in ways that make sense” he says.

September 22^nd – End of the August 2025 Spam Update

Launched on August 26^th, the Google August Spam Update finished rolling out 27 days later on September 22^nd with no further communication from Google on the subject.

Google update specialist Barry Schwartz commented on YouTube that the update “hit hard” with sites losing ranking and traffic almost immediately after its release – around August 27^th. More volatility was spotted in Google search results on September 9^th, but after this date a lot of SERP tracking tools stopped working (see the num=100 parameter update news above). If you have SEOPress Insights, however, you can reliably track your keyword position in Google over the period and see if you have gained or lost ranking from this update.

Whereas Core Updates are considered to be general modifications to ranking systems, a Spam Update is considered to be Google dealing out penalties to sites that infringe its spam policies like cloaking, hidden text, machine generated traffic or scaled content abuse. Reports of sites hit by the December 2024 Spam Update recovering during the August 2025 update also illustrate that sites can recover from penalties if they identify and address issues.

Google AI Mode becoming the default search mode with Chrome update

The article “Google AI Mode may become the default Google Search experience soon” published by Search Engine Land on September 7^th, forced Google Vice-President Robby Stein to publish a denial on X. The original news story was based on a previous publication on the same social network when Google Product Manager Logan Kilpatrick appeared to be telling a user on X that AI Mode would become Google’s default search result “soon”.

Launched in May, AI Mode is a new AI-chat response to queries currently available within Google Search as an alternative to traditional search results containing “ten blue links”. It has recently been released with its own URL on and has expanded to 180 countries and 7 languages (English, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish).

It is feared that if AI Mode becomes the default response from Google to user searches, sites will lose an enormous amount of organic traffic from Google. Advertisers using Google Ads are also unsure how AI Mode ads work and would be unlikely to be favorable to the disappearance of existing search results.

Then news was released on September 18^th that the new version of Chrome would integrate AI Mode into the address search bar, almost making it the default search mode on desktop. The article published on The Keyword blog, Chrome: The browser you love, reimagined with AI and as a YouTube video featured below, showcases new features rolling out to Chrome users in the US from the end of September. This follows on from Perplexity releasing its AI-first browser Comet in July and rumors that OpenAI will shortly release its own browser to compete with Chrome.

The new version of Chrome integrates an AI browsing assistant from Gemini with agentic capabilities. The Chrome address bar (which Google now call the Omnibox) will also be pimped by AI with the addition of contextual suggestions and the invitation to go to AI Mode to answer a question. It appears that typing a question and hitting enter will still take users to traditional search results, but AI Mode will be made much more prominent with this change.

Full video

If you target keywords in English or in the other 6 languages supported by AI Mode today, you should test AI Mode by searching for your keywords.

By Benjamin Denis

CEO of SEOPress. 15 years of experience with WordPress. Founder of WP Admin UI & WP Cloudy plugins. Co-organizer of WordCamp Biarritz 2023 & WP BootCamp. WordPress Core Contributor.