Were ads a hidden contributor to the impression spikes in Google Search Console all along?

Earlier this week, I received an interesting message from Amy Hyerczyk, who works on SEO for The RealReal. The message related to how there were some unusual parameter issues in Shopping ads that she had theorised could be impacting the analytics for some eCommerce stores.

While there is potentially more to this parameter issue, which I will be looking into further, I had a separate realisation about how URLs are now being presented within both text-based ads and Shopping ads for sites within search results.

What has changed?

To the best of my knowledge (it is quite difficult for me to analyse the history of this), I recall that when you were to hover over any kind of ad in search results, it would not show the full URL for the site. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe it would previously have functioned in this way.

Previously, I had remembered that I could never hover over ads to see the destination URL you were being taken to. Now, when you hover over an ad, you can see the exact destination URL. And I suspect Google may have made this change in order to prevent ads from deceiving users into going to a page that is different to what is being advertised.

When interacting with the link (opening it in a new window), the URL then changes to what I had remembered URLs to display like within ads with this as the start of the URL: https://www.google.com/aclk?

Because of this change in how URLs are presented in ads, a theory I have is that the ads unit (which appears as a feature in the main section of search results), previously wasn’t influential in impacting data within GSC. When they made the change, some of this data started to filter into GSC over time, with impressions and potentially contributing to issues in impression spikes for merchant listings when it comes to free listing results being the equivalent of Shopping ads.

Some past history

While I have covered the impact of tracking bots on impressions in GSC extensively in the past due to the disabling of &num=100, this feels like a completely separate issue, which is a bit harder for me to test and validate. For most sites, they will have a way to track their Shopping ads in GA4 with parameters to assist with attribution, with the above example appearing with the canonical and a 200 response despite the URL change.

This is all normal activity from Google’s end and how ads have been managed for many years. The interesting part is the presentation of the URL within Google’s search results, which I suspect has undergone a change in some capacity at one point, because I don’t recall that being the case in the past.

Is this still an issue?

It is difficult to say with any certainty if this is an ongoing issue or if Google has already patched it. Though, as I've mentioned in the past, there is a lot going on with impressions in Google Search Console that we haven't received a clear explanation for at this stage, aside from the logging error anomaly. Could this be related to the issue that Google was flagging for users? I can't say with any certainty, but I do have a hunch that if I'm right, that this is something that has changed in the recent past (within the last year or so), then I would expect that it could have easily impacted impressions and not clicks in GSC.