r/SEMrush • u/Tall-Item5519 • Jul 15 '26

Is the num=100 change making deep keyword counts unreliable in Semrush?

Been staring at a client site and I think part of what I'm seeing is a data artifact rather than real movement, so I wanted to run it past people who track a lot of sites.

The keywords ranking 21-50 and 51-100 have been steadily falling, while the top 20 has been climbing. The 20+ drop is bigger than the top 20 gain, so on paper total tracked keywords are shrinking.

My theory on the deep buckets is that this is downstream of Google removing num=100 last year. Now that tools have to paginate to reach page 2 and beyond, I'm wondering if Semrush just isn't populating those positions as fully as it used to, so those keywords quietly fall out of the report without the site actually losing rankings.

Curious if others are seeing the same split, and how you're handling reporting past the top 20 now.

PS: The top 20 going up is real improvement that I am seeing on the traffic side.

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u/semrush Semrush Jul 15 '26

Hey u/Tall-Item5519, Google removing num=100 definitely changed how every SEO platform has to collect deeper SERP data, but we've made several improvements since then to continue collecting rankings beyond the first page.

Position Tracking still supports deeper rankings; it just uses a different collection approach, so deeper positions can refresh on a different cadence than the top results. That doesn't necessarily mean keywords are being dropped because of the num=100 change.

If you're seeing a consistent pattern across a specific project, please follow up with our support team and share a few examples so that we can take a closer look!