Rank Tracking After Google Dropped num=100 — A Quick Fix with Serper API

If you’ve been running SEO rank tracking for any amount of time, you’ve probably bumped into the fallout from Google’s quiet update: the num=100 parameter no longer works.

For years, this parameter let you fetch the top 100 organic results from Google in a single request. Most rank tracking tools (and a lot of custom scripts) leaned heavily on it. Losing it has been a headache:

• Instead of a single request for 100 results, you now get ~10 results per page.

• Tools need to paginate, handle multiple requests, and stitch the results back together.

• Until vendors finish updating, rank tracking dashboards may feel incomplete or unreliable.
  

A stopgap: Serper API

While bigger SEO platforms are adjusting, I wanted a simple way to keep tracking keyword positions accurately. That’s where the Serper API comes in.

• It’s lightweight and fast.

• Pricing is cheap compared to full-featured enterprise SEO tools.

• You can page through results yourself, and reconstruct a “top 100” view the old num=100 way used to provide.

The best part? Serper gives you 2,500 free queries to experiment with before you need to upgrade. That’s enough to cover small projects or proof-of-concept tracking.

The tool I built

To test this idea, I built a small rank tracker on top of Serper.

👉 Try it here

How it works:

1. Paste your keywords (comma-separated or one per line).

2. Pick your location and country.

3. Choose how many pages to fetch.

4. The tool returns all organic results with adjusted positions across pages.
   

It’s nothing fancy - just practical. The output includes:

• Query

• Page

• Position (continuous across pages, so page 2 starts at 11)

• Title, description, link

• Location & country

• Timestamp

  
  
  
  

  

That’s enough to quickly see where you or a competitor site ranks, and to keep tracking rankings while the big SEO tools catch up.

Open code, free to adapt

Feel free to clone the repo and adapt it to your workflow. If you want to add custom reporting, database storage, or even alerts, the building blocks are all there.

Why this matters

Rank tracking is more than just an SEO vanity metric — it’s how we monitor visibility, opportunity, and change. Google’s num=100 update made the simple way vanish. But APIs like Serper keep the door open for smaller, faster, and cheaper rank tracking setups.

One caveat

If the Hugging Face demo doesn’t work when you try it, it’s likely because it’s already burned through its 2,500 free queries limit for the month. You can always spin up the code yourself with your own Serper key.

Wrapping up: Until the major SEO tools finish rolling out their fixes for the num=100 change, Serper API is a great substitute for anyone who needs accurate rank tracking now. Give it a try, and let me know what you’d build on top of it.