Why Did Rank-Tracker Pricing Change in 2025?

Because a change on Google’s side changed what it costs vendors to fetch a result page, and that cost is what your tracker’s price is built on. For years, appending num=100 to a search request returned up to a hundred results in one fetch — cheap for anyone gathering ranking data past position ten. When Google stopped honoring that parameter in 2025, getting the same depth suddenly required multiple fetches instead of one, and the vendors selling that data had to reprice around it.

What the parameter actually did

num=100 was never a documented, guaranteed feature — it was an undocumented behavior third parties relied on anyway, because it worked and it was efficient. One request, up to a hundred rows back. Any tool checking whether you rank at position 40 could get that answer in the same fetch as checking position four.

Retrieval, as covered in where a rank tracker’s data comes from, is the metered, marginal cost of the whole category. When that one fetch stopped returning deep results, checking the same keyword to the same depth started requiring several fetches — a fixed multiplier on the cost of everything past the first page, applied instantly across the entire industry the day it changed.

Why the repricing wasn’t uniform

Vendors didn’t all move the same amount, because they weren’t all selling the same product. Some SERP-data providers priced primarily around shallow checks — top ten or top twenty — where the parameter’s removal barely mattered, since a single fetch still covers that range. Others built their standard tier around deeper checks by default, and took the full multiplier on their base price.

Serply’s SERP API pricing comparison documents one concrete case: DataForSEO’s Standard queue absorbed roughly an 80% price cut in the aftermath, tied directly to the parameter’s removal changing what that tier could deliver per fetch. That’s a large, specific, dated move — not a general industrywide markup, but a correction on a product whose economics had shifted underneath it. Other categories in the same comparison, like enterprise scraping infrastructure priced per request regardless of depth, felt the change differently or not at all.

What this means if your tracker’s price or depth changed

A sudden change in how deep your tool checks is more informative than a price change alone. If your plan quietly started reporting to position 20 instead of 100, that’s the vendor absorbing the new cost by cutting depth rather than raising price — the same lever discussed in why do some rank trackers only update weekly, just applied to depth instead of frequency.

A price increase with no visible feature change usually means the vendor ate the cost until they couldn’t. Retrieval cost is invisible to you by design; you only see the sticker price, not the fetch count behind it.

Ask what changed, not just how much. “Did our checked depth change” and “did our update frequency change” are the two questions that actually explain a pricing shift. “The market got more expensive” is rarely the real answer, because the underlying event was a single, dated, technical one.

Why this kind of shift will happen again

Nothing about this was special to num=100 specifically — it’s a general property of building a product on top of someone else’s undocumented behavior. The dependency is invisible until the day it changes, and then it changes for everyone who relied on it simultaneously. A tracker’s pricing page looks stable for long stretches and then moves in a step, not a slope, and the step usually traces back to an event like this one rather than gradual inflation.

What to actually do

1. When a tracker’s price or depth changes suddenly, look for a dated, technical cause before assuming margin-chasing.
2. Ask your vendor directly what changed in their retrieval cost — a specific answer is a good sign; a vague one about “market conditions” is not.
3. Don’t assume deep-position data (position 40, 60, 80) will stay cheap indefinitely — it’s downstream of an undocumented behavior that has already changed once.
4. If a vendor’s pricing page cites a specific cause for a change, treat that as more trustworthy than one that simply raises numbers with no explanation attached — the specificity itself is a signal of how closely they track their own supply chain.