What’s Going On with Google Ranking Positions in SpyFu? 

This post is intended largely for our customer base who work with us on SEO. However, if you’ve stumbled upon this because you’ve been experiencing it with your clients (or as a client of another SEO agency), please keep reading and reach out to me if you have more information on this issue.

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If you read nothing else, here is the shortest summary of what is happening: Google changed some settings, and this prevents our keyword tracking software from “seeing” past position #10 in Google. This dramatically affects the numbers in our SEO reporting. But there might be a solution; more information to come.

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You may have noticed over the past month or two that some of the keyword tracking data we report has been wonky. 

The keywords your website had previously been ranking for dropped to position 100+ overnight.  As SEO professionals, this is always a huge red flag for us. But when we dug a little deeper into our data last month, it’s not that the websites have actually lost position; it’s that our keyword tracking software cannot scrape past position #10 anymore due to a change by Google.

How do we know this? We’ve “spot checked” random keywords in our client lists by physically running a search on Google for a tracked keyword…and the website is still ranking as normal. It’s just not being reported to our software.

And it’s not just the keyword tracking tool Bluestem Media uses. It’s an industry-wide issue. Many of our key performance indicators and day-to-day SEO tactics rely on having ranking visibility across a large number of keywords. 

What happened? 

Some of this is a little technical, so bear with me. Google changed the rules on how the SERP can be displayed in September 2025. You used to be able to amend a Google search URL with the num=100 parameter. SEO tracking tools would add “&num=100”, which would display all one hundred results for a keyword on one page, allowing their bot to view each result and return the correct information.  

Google disabled this num=100 parameter in mid-September of this year. It’s created havoc in the industry because industry tools were built on the ability to use the URL parameter to “scrape” data from the search engine results page. This allowed us to “see” where your website was ranking for any keyword, anywhere on the search engine results. 

Now, we can only track positions #1-#10, and #11-#100 cannot be tracked. This means keywords that were on the cusp of being first page (say position #12) have now gone into the #100+ bucket, with no nuanced information.

The plan for our clients going forward

Our data provider, SpyFu, announced on October 16, 2025 they found a solution to keep the top 100. We are happy to hear this, but it has not yet been fixed on our accounts as of this writing. All of our client accounts are still bifurcated between the two buckets:  #1-#10 keywords and #100+ keywords.  

We have been in contact with the SpyFu team, and they escalated the issue to their dev team on October 27th. 

There are three options on the table: 

1. SpyFu resolves the issue and returns full SERP visibility

If SpyFu can build a workaround to still display full ranking data for all 100 Google positions, we will continue to use this in our client reporting. 

2. Another SEO tracking software creates a solution, and we switch providers

If SpyFu cannot figure out the issue for our client accounts, and there is another software tracking provider that has solved the issue and is in the same cost range as SpyFu, we will switch data providers. 

3. If this remains an industry-wide issue, we will change how reporting is done 

If SpyFu (and every other data provider) cannot affordably solve this issue, we will change how we report SEO numbers. We are already experimenting with a few options, but we want to give SpyFu a little more time before bailing on our methods. 

Final thoughts

Good SEO relies on consistent data. Consistent data allows us to compare apples to apples and see progress or regression. If we lose visibility in the full search engine results page, it makes it harder for us to make decisions and communicate progress to our SEO clients. 

We still have many good tools at our fingertips: Google Search Console, spot checking Google results, and BrightLocal for local SEO packages. Our team has used these tools to patch together SEO results and help diagnose what is happening to rankings. But losing access to such a powerhouse tracking tool will be unfortunate.

Our commitment is to adapt where needed and clearly communicate SEO results. More updates to come soon!