Google has improved the accuracy of website traffic analytics – so don’t despair if your traffic numbers appear to have dropped!
Bots — automated software programs that perform tasks online — are the main drivers of artificial traffic. According to some reports, automated traffic can account for as much as half of all web traffic, with a significant portion of that being malicious.
The “100 pages” technical inflation
A technical quirk in Google search results has also been inflating impression counts. Historically, search engines allowed users to change the number of results displayed per page, typically by adding a &num= parameter to the search URL.
• The mechanism – SEO tools and other bots sometimes used the &num=100 parameter to load 100 search results at once. When a bot loaded this page, it would register 100 impressions for all the websites on that page, even if a human user would have only seen the first few results.
• Recent change – In mid-September 2025, Google disabled the &num=100 results parameter. This led to a visible drop in desktop impression numbers for many SEO professionals, confirming that this technical mechanism had been inflating metrics.
The consequences of inflated metrics
The distortion of analytics data by bots and technical loopholes had significant repercussions for website owners.
• Inaccurate performance analysis – Inflated impression numbers can give a false sense of success, leading to poor decision-making and a misunderstanding of actual user engagement.
• Wasted marketing budget – For campaigns relying on impression-based billing, inflated metrics can mean paying for bot-driven activity that yields no real business value.
• Inaccurate metrics – Bots can corrupt other analytics data, such as bounce rates and session durations, making it harder to interpret legitimate user behaviour.
What this means now
While Google has addressed one source of inflation by modifying its search result parameters, bot traffic remains a pervasive issue on the internet.
At Blacksmith we actively monitor and filter out bot traffic from client’s analytics to ensure the accuracy of their data and marketing efforts.
To see what Blacksmith can do for you, get in touch today!
