If you’re someone who regularly looks at Google Search Console impressions, you might notice a sharp drop in the number of impressions for your site since 12 September 2025.
This is probably as a result of this change in the way GSC is counting ‘an impression’.
If you care for the technical detail, this article is a really great place to start.
However, just because the number of impressions has dropped, it doesn’t actually mean anyone will be seeing your site any less, and doesn’t mean that there are issues with your search appearance: it is just Google re-establishing a baseline for impressions, which is hopefully more accurate than what we have seen previously.
From what I understand, for most sites, this will mean the number of impressions will appear to drop by around 100x – so a really noticeable drop, and that can be quite alarming when you look at the GSC dashboard, especially if you’re someone who routinely looks at the number of impressions your site is getting.
But also be reassured: this change doesn’t necessarily mean there is a problem with your site, or your search appearance. This is global change that will affect all sites to a greater or lesser degree.
This is really just a new way of counting, so we have to reset our understanding of impressions from now on.
Typically, I’ve always used impressions as a way to share with clients early signs of progress in search appearance: before we see an improvement in clicks, we usually see an increase in impressions. Before we see an increase in leads, we see an increase in clicks…
That will still be true for new sites, but it will be hard for the next few months to be able to observe changes in number of impressions, or to be able to interpret that data, as the rate of visible change will be slower, and less apparent. We will use other methods, such as keyword visibility in search.
Google hasn’t commented on this change; it’s just something that we as SEO experts have observed as happening across the board. It affects almost all sites. Industry chatter leads me to suspect the change is to account for the number of bots that are crawling the internet since the introduction of AI.
So I wanted to let you know that this is happening, in case you were to look at Google Search Console and see something alarming. I’ll share more information with you as is useful.
Best wishes,
Claire.
Founder of Aloha Life Digital
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