Did anyone notice Google did this?

General
1

Hey folks, I was reading up on some stuff online and stumbled across something wild about Google. Apparently, last month they quietly removed the num=100 search parameter. Basically, you used to be able to see 100 results on one page, but now the hard limit is 10.

Sounds minor, right? But it’s actually huge. Most AI models like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity pull info from Google’s indexed results. By cutting off all those extra results, Google basically just shrunk what AI can see by like 90 percent. The web just got a lot shallower, not just for us, but for AI too.

Some numbers: Search Engine Land says around 88 percent of websites saw drops in impressions. If your site used to show up in results 11-100, it basically disappeared. Reddit itself, which often ranks deeper, saw its citations in LLMs drop too.

This isn’t just about SEO. It’s about the AI supply chain. Google just made it harder for external AI models to get the full picture of the web. For startups, this is brutal. Even if you build an amazing product, it’s going to be harder for people to discover it organically.

Feels like we’re entering a new era of algorithmic visibility. Crazy how a small change in search settings can ripple out to impact AI and the entire web ecosystem.

2

This is a fascinating take. It’s a subtle but powerful move by limiting visibility to just 10 results, Google basically controls what both humans and AIs see as “the truth.” The open web just got a lot less open.

3

I’m not totally convinced this change will affect AI training that much. Most LLMs don’t scrape Google directly they use web-scale datasets or Common Crawl. Still, the SEO visibility side of this is definitely concerning.

4

Wait, that’s wild. Why would Google want to do that though? Wouldn’t they want AI models to have access to better data if it’s all going to improve search anyway?

5

Ugh, this explains so much. Our organic traffic tanked last month and I couldn’t figure out why. If Google’s basically hiding 90% of results, small startups like ours are gonna have a brutal time being discovered.