Google Experiments With Restricting Results Per Page

Intro

Google has started testing yet another groundbreaking change to how the results are served. This time, the affected area is the number of results returned in a single search. Those experienced with Google SERPs know that you can get up to 100 results in a single search, but this seems to potentially be a thing of the past. What does it mean? I'll try to explain.

Background

At SerpApi, we support declaring the number of results in our Google Search API with the num parameter. It ranges from 10 (the default) up to 100 results in a single search. Lately, we have noticed a significant change in the parameter’s behavior.

The first time we noticed some inconsistencies dates back to early 2023. You can check our Public Roadmap thread discussion for reference. Initially, the inconsistencies were not very prevalent, and you could still consistently get 100 results in a single search if you wished to. This changed at the beginning of 2025, when one of our engineers noticed more and more queries ignoring the num parameter. This happened specifically with certain types of searches including the knowledge_graph. We also made a note about this in our documentation.

This time, though, it looks like the change is even more significant, and Google is much more aggressive in its attempt to limit the output to the default 10 results.

What actually happened?

Lately, the number of results returned with the num parameter has been very inconsistent, which you can observe in our engineer's benchmarks. At this point, it was clear that something bigger was happening, as this did not look like some random variability we had observed in the past.

Currently, more often than not, you'll get 10 organic_results despite attempting to get 100. You can test it for yourself using our Playground.

Only 10 organic_results despite num=100 used

Does that mean you can't get 100 or more results from a Google search? Not at all. You can, of course, still get there with pagination, but this creates more challenges and generates additional costs.

Who's affected?

While you might not notice a huge difference in your day-to-day Google searching, there are certainly groups of people whose work will be greatly affected:

SEO - oftentimes, SEO experts rely on getting as many results as possible in as few searches as they can. This change makes it harder to analyze results quickly at scale and requires them to paginate.
Developers/API users - this is another group of people who might be upset with the change, as the costs of the same output via API are now significantly higher with pagination.

So are there any positives in this change? Actually, yes! API calls with the num parameter have historically been more prone to CAPTCHA challenges, so this change can potentially improve the overall performance of an API.

Outro

While this is not official change yet, Google has a long track record of making it harder to scrape its search results, and this seems to be the latest step in that direction. While the change is disruptive and inconvenient for many, it also challenges us to adapt. We're experts in that, and we are always committed to delivering the best scraping services possible.

Want to try SerpApi yourself? Get 250 free searches by signing up! Feel free to also reach out to us with any questions or concerns through the chat or at contact@serpapi.com.

Follow us!
YouTube | X | TikTok | Instagram | Facebook