DemandSphere will focus on the SERP data that matters while giving ultimate flexibility to those who need deeper pagination depths. 

This change is a clarifying event for the entire industry, and we believe it is imperative to focus on the factors that most impact actual searcher behavior. 

This means that the top 3 pages (really the first page), especially all of the SERP Features, AI Overviews, People Also Asked data, pixel depth, and Visual Rank matter more than ever. 

That said, there are a number of clients who prefer to go to the top 5 pages, so we have enabled this as the default going forward. This will enable clients to get the “top 50” results by default.

The exception will be clients who are on weekly plans, which typically occurs for very large volume plans. These plans will still get the top 5 pages, just on a weekly basis instead of daily.

Our focus is on the changes (and future changes)  that impact human searchers the most, which is why we are providing the following changes: 

The Top 3 pages are where the action is. This includes all of the relevant factors that our clients are measuring daily: AI Overviews, SERP Features, Ads, CTR models, Share of Voice (SoV), and more. We are also going to the following two pages, so the top 5 pages. We will provide the top 5 SERP pages data at no additional cost, daily. Clients who are on weekly plans for larger volumes will receive the top 5 SERP pages on the weekly schedule.

If you want deeper depths on a daily basis, no problem. We already have a number of clients that are tracking the top 5 pages historically, and we will be doing this for them going forward. Just contact your Account Manager, and we’ll walk you through the options.

We are still wrapping up some operational improvements to keep processing times within the daily window and we expect those to conclude by the end of this week. We will make further announcements if needed.

We’ve always had a focus on the feature-rich top of the SERPs, so we’ve never placed a huge emphasis on going to position 100. All of our existing website copy, unchanged since this change, reflects that history. 

Depending on the market, customer needs, etc., we have had different result depths that we have provided. We are keeping this in mind as we decide the new policy to offer the best mix of depth where needed in a way that reflects the new cost structures in place.

Our platform has a great deal of flexibility to enable us to fetch whatever page depth is needed and reflect those averages but only when you want to include them. You’ll have parameters that you can enable / disable in your reporting so that you’re not forced to include these averages in your reporting back to stakeholders. 

We also aren’t planning to do any backfills (by default) to mix in data from SERP pages 4-10 (as an example) into result sets where they don’t match on the daily side of things. These can lead to erroneous conclusions from the data.

We prefer to provide deeper pagination on a daily basis so that this is not needed.

We understand that clients may need deeper pagination depths and that this can sometimes vary even on a site by site level. Just ask your Account Manager so we can begin the discussions with you on this topic.

From a technical perspective, there are a number of interesting things to note here.

The main thing that we want to highlight now is that when we paginate results, we will be using the same IP address and the same cookie session to get accurate results. There is a great danger in not doing a proper job of this because the results will be random and not in any way accurate. 

The big change, of course, is you previously used to be able to get all 100 results with a single search on Google. There was a parameter that you could include in the URL (&num=100) and you would automatically get all 100 results. 

Now, real human searchers never use this parameter, so this had problems of its own but the industry basically just accepted it. 

Some of the problems included the ad placement, and ads that would appear differently than what human searchers would see. Additionally, the pixel measurements were based on the top 100 results layout, but in actuality, it’s more accurate to measure pixel depth from the top of each page, the way a human would see it. 

As a result, we are updating SERP Rewind to support pagination through the results, so this will be more accurate than before as a reflection of human user behavior. 

We are also going to be recording the page number in the dataset, so you’ll be able to see both the page number and pixel depth (which will reset to 0 for each page). 

All that to say, we believe that this is a superior and more customer-centric offering to what was industry standard before because it more accurately reflects real human usage. 

Accuracy and transparency are two of our core values and we will continue to deliver on this promise. 

The daily pagination for the top 5 is already working and our fetching operations have been stable for the last 3 days now, especially for Desktop.

For Mobile, we will need a few more days to stabilize this new operation to 5 pages so we are returning the top 3 pages daily until that work is complete.

We are still optimizing our surrounding processes to accommodate the increase in processing requests of the data (because there are 5x the number of requests coming through now within the 24 hour time window. )

Most clients won’t notice much on their ends but if you do experience any delays, this is the main reason. Please contact your Account Manager with any concerns.

We are aiming to have this all finalized by the end of this week.

For any additional questions, feel free to contact your Account Manager. We can schedule any follow-up meetings as needed.  

Our view is that this data belongs to you, the customer. Google (and other engines) have built business empires on the data that comes from our websites, our traffic, our customers, and our analytics data.

Our mission is to make sure you have access to it so that you can use it to make accurate decisions to drive business growth. This helps to foster the health of the open web. This is what we focus on every day and it remains our commitment to you. 

Our primary objective during this phase (over the next month) is to ensure stability and continue to gather feedback from our clients. 

There is another event potentially on the horizon when it comes to big changes from Google: the launch of AI Mode by default.

We’re not convinced yet that this change is imminent and we’re not even sure that will happen in the next year. But we are certainly keeping an eye on it and we are ready. We have had the ability to monitor AI Mode since May 2025 and can cover any available languages and countries now. 

It is a good idea, in our view, to consider tracking AI Mode now, if you’re not already. If and when it comes, you’ll be glad to have the historical data. Keep it simple by starting with your existing keywords (or a subset), don’t worry too much about query length, etc. Google knows how to interpret topic and search intent, regardless of query / string length. 

Ray and the team are in San Diego this week at brightonSEO. We have a booth, so if you are going to be there, be sure to come and say hi. 

We have a lot of new product feature updates that we are excited to share, including ChatGPT query fan-outs, log analytics data, updates to our LLM / AI visibility analytics, and much more. 

Ray will be speaking on Wednesday morning in the track on AI & SERPs. Hope to see you there!