Why we track the top 20 by default

On 11 September 2025 Google stopped honouring the num=100 parameter. Before that date, asking for a hundred results was one page load. Since then it is ten.

What that did to every rank tracker

Depth 100 became ten times more expensive overnight, for everybody, with no notice. There were three possible responses and the industry took all three.

Some trackers absorbed the cost and are quietly running at a much worse margin. Some raised prices. And some kept advertising depth 100 while sampling: checking the deep positions weekly instead of daily, or on a rotating subset of keywords, without saying so on the pricing page. The third is the one worth being careful about, because from the outside it looks identical to the first.

What we did

Depth 20 is the default on every plan. That is pages one and two, which is where a click happens and where a decision gets made. If a keyword is at 47 the useful fact is that it is not on page one, and knowing whether it is 47 or 52 today changes nothing you would do.

Depth 100 is available as a flat monthly add-on for a site, capped at 200 keywords. The cap is not an upsell. It is the number at which the add-on still covers what it costs us to run, and we would rather print the cap than sell something we have to quietly degrade later.

What we will not do

We will not sample without saying so. If a check did not run, the graph shows a gap rather than carrying yesterday's number forward, and a result that failed validation is thrown away rather than stored. A tracker that fills in the blanks is worse than one that admits to them.

What depth 20 means for a new site

For a site that ranks nowhere yet, depth 20 will show "not found" for most of a keyword list, and that is the correct answer rather than a missing one.

"Not found" means outside the top 20. It does not mean absent from Google, and it does not mean the page is broken. What moves a keyword from not found to a number is almost never a tracking setting: it is a page that deserves to be there.

This is where the crawl earns its place. A new site's first audit usually explains more about why nothing ranks than the position graph does, because the answer is often that the page is thin, or that nothing links to it, or that the canonical points somewhere else.

Why the whole top 20 is stored

Because the interesting question is rarely "where am I". It is "who is above me, and what changed".

Storing the whole result page per check means competitor positions are there without a second subscription and without deciding in advance which competitors to watch. A site that appears above you for the first time is visible the day it appears, rather than the day you think to add it.

The add-on, and its cap

Depth 100 is a flat monthly add-on for a site, capped at 200 keywords. The cap is printed rather than hidden because it is the number at which the add-on still covers what it costs to run, and a limit you can read is better than a service that quietly degrades.