GOOGLE TURNS OFF THE TAB: WHAT THE NUM=100 CHANGE MEANS FOR SEO

E87 GOOGLE TURNS OFF THE TAB_ WHAT THE NUM=100 CHANGE MEANS FOR SEO

Transcript

Dalton Anderson (00:01.07) Welcome to Venture Step Podcasts, where we discuss entrepreneurship, industry trends, and the occasional book review. Today, we're going to be discussing Google turning off the tab. And what does that mean? What do I mean by that? Well, Google recently changed the backdoor unsupported, widely used parameter that you could specify. with like ampersand, num equals 100, which would then allow you to return 100 search results versus the normal.

out. And this change is widely

regarded as a direct response to competitors using their platform to scrape data, to train, but it also has implications further than just AI stuff. It also affects SEO, marketers, the whole nine yards. Everybody's got to re-architect. And so it's a big change. It's just not a change that people necessarily are widely discussing or

that people will realize because no one is really in the background of the internet, right? It's bots v bots, similar to the dead internet theory. Well, let's get into it. So just providing a little background of some things that Google has done. So mid September, 2025, the disappearing act is I'll phrase it, the N equals 100 was removed.

So you can no longer do that. so what that does and who primarily uses it was automated systems, especially SEO tools for businesses and third parties that train or create training data sets for AI companies to utilize. That's been removed.

Dalton Anderson (01:59.38) And Google's response was, Hey, it was, it wasn't really an officially supported feature. It was just something that we had. And so we just stopped supporting it. We didn't remove it. It was just not supported. And so it was something that we never supported in the first place. And we just let it go, which is, which is, I guess an okay response.

And then another thing that was done, and this was in 2024, June, was the removal of endless scroll. So you used to be able to just scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. They've removed that. So it's only really relevant, I think, on your phone. Like if you go on your phone, I'm on my phone right now, go on your phone and just type in whatever you want. I'll do Liverpool Football Club because that's the team I like. If you scroll down all the way to the bottom, it says more search results.

and then you have to click that and then it creates more search results. So you just got to consistently do that if you wanted to see more results. And then the thing that may affect you is when you do a search on the internet, you only get 10 links and it's 10 pages with 10 links now versus where you normally would be able to get more information.

There's a whole bunch of different psychological things going on there. Like the thing about the endless scroll, it was removed because it didn't improve user satisfaction and it prevents people from being on the highly monetized area, right? You want your users to stay at the top, to stay near the AI summary, to stay within like the first four links because that's what's sponsored. Those are the people that have the

authoritative

Dalton Anderson (03:54.367) I guess authority in that space, knowledge authority, respect. I was having a hard time phrasing that.

But the impact of that is immediate, right? Where this disappearing act of the num equals 100 is a big deal. It's making all these companies, either if your workflow was to utilize this, to scrape data, to create training pipelines for AI companies, that is now 10x the price. So it makes it either if you're doing it in-house or outsourcing it,

it's much more expensive.

then these SEO tools or these different tools or your analytics are now no longer inflated. Where I know from my podcast website, and I'm certainly not that guy where I was sometimes getting 20,000 visits in a week. And that's just not realistic. That's not real. So I think another thing that

is nice about this is you have less bot traffic to your site. So your numbers are no longer as inflated as they normally would be, which I think is interesting.

Dalton Anderson (05:23.662) But yeah, the tenfold cost of utilizing the tool for the scraping is just an immediate stamp on.

the process. Like, hey, if you want to do this, it's going to cost 10 times the money. And so the Google gets more revenue, but it's probably not that much. then

It just makes it that much more difficult. It adds an extra step, adds more expense, makes the fee a little bit less realistic. And the consequences are just immediate. There's less data to go around, there's less keyword tracking, there's less stuff that people could utilize because it costs way more money. And so people are no longer gonna be able to just

mathematically game the algorithm as much. If they want to do that, it's more expensive. If they want to have their AI training data sets, it's more expensive. And so I think it becomes more organic in that sense to where...

the metrics of your website seem to be less inflated. There wasn't that many visitors. The process of which you're discovering these keywords might be better. Who knows? It recently just happened, so still trying to figure out where we go from here. from what I've heard, people were freaking out. Like this is a big change, this is massive.

Dalton Anderson (07:07.286) And I think it's a good thing. I am a Google fan. do. I am pretty hard on Google with the stuff I say about them, but I think that if people want to train on your on your search browser and they want to utilize it to compete against you, then shouldn't make it that easy. Shouldn't remove their ability to do it, but you shouldn't make it easy. You're not giving out free food here. So.

What does Google get out of this? Well, this is the AI arms race, right? Where they're fortifying their data, their remote. So they've got YouTube with videos and content. They've got Chrome and Google, which are the most utilized search browsers and search engines or search engine. I said browsers, but I think I meant

as like their browser because Microsoft Edge also uses them but uses different search browser, search engine. You know what mean. So.

it is shoring up loose sense where they're making it more difficult to be competed against. And they've already got this massive data set on video, text, everything, the whole nine yards. The only one that really has anywhere close to the level of data might be Metta. Metta has got a pretty strong for hold in short form videos, texts, or yeah, that and

XAI, XAI has a lot of threaded texts. So there's a couple of groups, but.

Dalton Anderson (08:58.913) I still feel pretty strongly that Google has the best data to compete and then they have the best infrastructure out of any of those companies that they're competing against. The only one that would be relevant would be Microsoft, but their, their, their, their horse is on open AI and their recent comments the last couple of months.

seem to be indirectly targeted towards OpenAI and their unrealistic expectations and the way that they run the company. And so they're not too thrilled. I think the partnership is kind of falling apart-ish. We'll see how it all plays out. mean, once you've already made billions of dollars in investments, you're kind of stuck. So you can't really undo that one. You can't untangle. There's no divorce in that. You're in for the ride.

So this is like a declaration of war where it's like, okay, like you want to scrape the data? Fine. Boom. You cause 10 X and it's, it's kind of a gray area because it's technically not illegal to scrape data, public data. It does violate Google's terms of service, but courts have ruled that scraping data isn't technically illegal because it's public.

So it's just like this shadow gray area where Google doesn't like it, it's not necessarily illegal. And so there's really like nothing you can really do about it. You can make it harder and make it cost more money or these other things, but yeah.

Transitioning from that, there's two schools of thought. So there's Microsoft School of Thought and then there is Google School of Thought and they have two different ways of envisioning the search, search in its future and what search looks like in the future. Google thinks of it in a way of answer-based and then Microsoft thinks about it as like publisher-friendly. So.

Dalton Anderson (11:19.267) The difference between the two is Google is thinking about in a way these AI overviews and citing websites when you're an authoritative source, citing those websites and getting the answer as quickly as possible to the user. or suggest websites as quickly as possible to the user. Whereas Microsoft Edge and Microsoft, they have our

I guess it would be Bing, because it's the search engine that we're talking about. So they think that they want to be more publisher centric to where they are protecting the publisher and they want to push the users to the publisher's site. Which I don't think really works, right? I don't think that's efficient because in a world where

We all have AI devices like AI glasses or a watch or some thing that we wear in our neck. All that stuff. If that is the case and that's how it plays out and it looks likely to do so, then people are going to have a different expectation when they have a query, which is a question. And when you're curious about something, you're not going to want to scrape

through websites with yourself. Like you don't wanna do that as a human. You want the answer, you wanna know where to go, and that's it. Like if I ask you a question, a direct question, and then you start telling me, talk to my friend Bob and Tierra, they could really help you out. Like that may work for certain things, but for the most part, I just wanna know what the answer to my question is, and then if I...

have free time or if I'm curious and want additional information, I could talk to Tierra and Bob, have them as a reference, have them as a citation, and I could click in and check it out if I wanted. Whereas Microsoft has the other ways where it's just like, okay, let's push the user to the website, and then Google is like, I wanna push the answer to the user. If they wanna go to the website, that's fine.

Dalton Anderson (13:42.96) So I honestly think it would be better to just get the answer. And we've all had conversations with those folks that you ask them a question and they just answer it in such a roundabout way and just wiggle out of each question and just like, okay, are you answering the question or not? Why are you responding to my question if you're not gonna answer it?

Don't respond, just be direct. No one's got time for a 30 minute explanation or 45 second explanation. I said 30 minute and then 45, but X seconds. it's just that it doesn't work. Fundamentally, it just doesn't work. It's not what users would expect going forward. Right? So it's something that we talked about in my...

geo search engine optimization episode and the changes that AI summaries and AI LLMs and all this other stuff has changed the way that people search and is going to continue to do so. And I talked about how you'd want to become an authoritative source and that you want to

Dalton Anderson (15:02.831) want to not only rank within different topics, but you want to be seen as an authoritative source in that space so that the AI summaries and the LLMs that are using search to populate data to a user are citing your website, are suggesting your website.

Dalton Anderson (15:26.497) which is the best thing, right? So I talked about some of the things that you could do. You want to have structured data. You want to have the experience, the expertise, the authoritativeness and the trustworthiness. Then you want to have a schema markup of your website. You want it to be easy for the LLM to navigate, comprehend and understand where to go, where to get the information. And you have to create very

detailed information that probably is too detailed for human, but is perfect for an LLM to cite you. Because they want to know what's going on. They want to have all the context of your page, of whatever you're talking about. And they also want to see your citations in session. So you're at the end of the day, you're just an aggregator. aggregating, you're un-aggregating data for the LLM to aggregate versus before you

you would aggregate data for people to consume. This is now you're providing the raw data to the LLM and the LLM is gonna take care of it for everybody else.

Dalton Anderson (16:40.013) I think it's pretty interesting.

Shout out to my mother, Lisa. She was the one who sent me some videos about this. And yeah, she just locked it, right? Like my mom's sending me these videos and it's like, this might be a good topic. Check this out. And I'm like, wow, this is very interesting. Thank you for sharing. I will be discussing this. And I thought it was really cool and it...

is something that is going to become more of a problem later on than it is right now because it literally just happened. But it's very interesting how everything is going to be playing out here in the next three years. Not only are things going to change massively on a day to day, but also

I wanna know what happens. How does this all play out? Does everyone just make their own search engine and then scrape the internet and...

Dalton Anderson (17:49.007) How do you know that you're consistently being an authoritative source? How do you measure that? Do we have an authoritative source ranking now? Instead of SEO, it's your authoritative source. All these things are changing so rapidly and they've been the same way for, I don't know, since what, 1998? think that was when Google was founded.

And so it's just boggling people's minds. They're freaking out. They're freaking out. There's blood in the streets. I want to know how it all plays out. I hope you do too. Thank you for listening. And of course, wherever you are in this world, good afternoon, good evening, good morning. Thank you for listening in. See you next week. I can't really see it, but you'll see me. All right. Cheers. Bye.