September 2025 brought a major shake-up in how Google handles data collection, and it’s already impacting dental websites across the country. Google quietly shut down a URL parameter that allowed ranking tools and AI platforms like ChatGPT to pull 100 search results at once. Now, those same tools can only access 10 results per request—making it 10 times more expensive and much less efficient to track rankings.
Why Is This Happening?
With the advent of hundreds and thousands of AI tools scraping Google for data, Google’s costs have skyrocketed. People and bots are scraping so much data from Google that Google appears to be limiting users’ data collection to save money and defend its infrastructure from what it deems heavy automated use.
Additionally, Google is clearly concerned with ChatGPT’s steady growth, which cuts into its search dominance.
Limiting the number of results that ChatGPT can gather forces it (and other LLMs) to rely on a smaller pool of data, diminishing the quality or thoroughness of its answers, and steering users to rely on better data from Google’s AI Mode instead.
What Does This Mean for the Dental Industry?
In the short term, Google’s data collection limitation has impacted 87.7% of all websites, lessening their search impression rate by as much as 50%. AI bots are making fewer searches because of the 10x cost, and the immediate impact starting around Sept 10 is a reduction in the search impression rate for all dental websites.
Your website is still visible to the internet, and we’re seeing that many core top 10 keyword rankings are intact, but all websites are seeing a reduction in search engine impressions that reflect a reduction in unnecessary bloat from AI bot impressions. This means non-human impression data is no longer fattening the data.
In the long term, Google Search Console (Google’s website data collection) is more accurately reflecting human searchers, and that is who dentists want to reach and serve.
Ranking Trackers Gone Wild
This change affects rankings trackers dramatically as they show inconsistencies beyond the top 10 results, since Google is now limiting their data collection. For now, most ranking trackers are broken beyond the top 10.
With deep-level tracking becoming far more expensive, ranking trackers are adapting rather than 10x their costs to collect the same data.
SEO rank checkers and SERP scrapers will eventually adjust to the new model of 10 search results, but for the current month, ranking trackers are fluctuating wildly.
In lieu, use an incognito search engine results page (SERP) to monitor real-time rankings while your dental marketing agency finds a permanent solution to Google’s new rules.
How to Take Advantage of Google’s Shift
The top 10-20 results are where the vast majority of clicks occur, but now Google’s top 10 is more important than ever.
Search trackers and LLMs are gathering data only from the top 10 search results of Google’s search engine. If you are ranking in the top 10 for Google’s search engine results page (SERPs), your dental practice will also be preferred in LLMs like ChatGPT.
Your business’ focus should be on two layers of marketing optimization: 1) search engine optimization (SEO) 2) artificial intelligence optimization (AIO), also called generative engine optimization (GEO)
SEO drives your top 10 results. AIO drives your ability to appear in LLMs and Google’s AI overviews.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the foundation of digital marketing for dentists, and ranking in the top 10 is the essential doorway into ChatGPT (and other LLM) visibility.
Summary
Google is pushing everyone to focus on what really matters: showing up in the top 10 where real patients are searching. September 2025 will be remembered as the month Google chose to limit third-party search data to 10 results. For dentists this means fewer artificial search impressions showing up in your data, short-term inconsistencies in ranking trackers, and a heightened focus on search engine optimization for ranking in the top 10 results.