Sites taking advantage of Google Merchant Center (GMC) to promote products have recently noticed odd changes concerning the srsltid parameter appearing in reporting data. These changes have been noticed when comparing Google Analytics 4 (GA4) session data with Google Search Console (GSC) click data. Subsequently, traffic has been incorrectly attributed in analytics, leading to misleading reports that dilute stats for the canonical URLs and attribute organic result clicks to GMC.

Why is it happening?

Google has expanded its use of srsltid parameterised URLs from GMC to the organic SERP results.

GMC has an auto-tagging option that appends the srsltid parameter to URLs submitted via GMC. This permits performance tracking and reporting within GMC so ecommerce sites can track how their free and paid product listings perform in the shopping results and carousels.

When did it start?

Around the beginning of August 2024, several site owners began to see GMC URLs appearing in the traditional search results. For those with GMC and GA4 connected, this led to the appearance of the parameterised URLs ranking in place of their canonical counterparts in the traditional organic SERP. Google had expanded its use of GMC parameterised URLs so they also appeared in conventional search results where one would have expected only to see canonical versions.

What does it mean?

As a result of the change by Google, tracking tools have started reporting parameterised URLs as ranking in place of their canonical counterparts. Reporting data is now skewed with respect to GMC parameterised URLs reporting clicks and conversions from organic search as GMC traffic.

What does Google say about the changes?

Google’s John Mueller clarified the change in their use of the srsltid parameter. “They’re added in search directly, with unique IDs using the “srsltid” parameter… The URLs are not indexed or crawled like that. It’s not a new setup, we’ve used this for quite some time for example in the shopping tab. We’ve now expanded it to traditional search results”.

Mueller went further to iterate “This doesn’t affect crawling, indexing, or ranking — it’s basically just for analytics for merchants. While not necessary, you can use the link rel=canonical element pointing at the preferred URL for indexing as you normally would. If you don’t want it, you can just turn off the setting (though it seems useful to me!). In Search Console, you mostly see the old usage of the parameter, we try to filter it out for the normal search results.”

How does it affect SEOs?

As Mueller mentions, this is not a change to how Google ingests content — only a change in the URLs displayed in the SERP where a GMC parameterised version exists. If you have a GMC feed with auto-tagging turned on, you will see the parameterised version appearing in the SERP, where before you would typically only see the canonical version.

With respect to reporting in GSC, you may see instances where the parameterised URLs are reported on in addition to the canonical versions where filtering them out hasn’t been effective.

How does it affect analysis and reporting?

Ranking reports in GSC and third-party tools may display parameterised URLs as ranking in place of the original canonical versions in GMC and other reporting tools.
Analysts will see data attribution being somewhat skewed where GMC links have gained traffic and conversions from the organic SERP, but the GMC feed is attributed with the conversion when it is technically organic traffic.

Knock-on effects to be aware of

While Google does appear to be “cleaning up” or at least has made folks aware the GMC URLs are reported upon in GSC, there are still cases where parameterised URLs are still in GSC. Under certain conditions it can appear the canonical version with no parameters no longer ranks, but the parameterised version does.

If you use GMC, GA4 and GSC, all three should be connected to improve data quality and attribution in all three platforms. Unfortunately, there appears to be no reliable way to clean up historical data at scale. Correctly connecting all three platforms should reduce the confusion within Google reporting products.

Possible actions you might need to take

For larger websites, ensure your Content Delivery Network (CDN) is set to ignore tracking parameters, including srsltid and Google Click Identifier (GCLID) when caching. Doing this can significantly improve site speed and reduce server costs.

Parameters in URLs can disrupt the caching process by treating similar pages with different parameters as unique, resulting in multiple cache versions of essentially the same page. Multiple versions of the same thing will lead to slower loading times and unnecessary server strain. Ignoring these parameters helps maintain efficient caching, delivering the cached version of the page faster and reducing server load.

Mueller states that you can turn off the auto-tagging setting in GMC, but doing so will result in the loss of GMC tracking data and the correct attribution of traffic and sales from the GMC listings altogether. It would potentially be a step back for your reporting due to the loss of data.

Instead, ensure any GMC feed URLs have a correctly formed canonical tag pointing to the canonical, non-parameterised version. This should prevent any duplicate pages from being indexed incorrectly.

Resist the temptation to apply a noindex tag to all GMC feed links. The reason the parameterised URLs are appearing in the organic SERP is purely down to the change by Google — not because the GMC feed link lacks a noindex tag. Adding a noindex tag to GMC feed URLs could lead to broader problems.

Final thoughts

This issue exists largely due to Google making changes and not doing much to notify website owners hence an element of confusion in the industry. Given that many departments at Google are siloed with little communication across them, issues like this are not really a surprise, but are nevertheless confusing for website owners, SEOs and analysts.

If you need help with this new parameter and the usage of it, we offer extensive technical SEO services to keep your site on track.