For anyone with a similar issue, this is dependent on the theme you are using. I don’t use a common theme such as Dawn so, the results can vary.
I was unable to resolve the issue. I worked with Raj for several days and he helped explain why my theme was the issue. Since I didn’t want to modify the theme, I instead opt’ed to modify the results page per category on our site. Increasing the default preview from 20 to 100 products. This seems a bit excessive, but with modern image compression/optimization it didn’t make much of a difference in terms of loading speeds and overall connectivity to our site visitors.