How long your data is kept

The two-day lag

Search Console takes about two days to finalise each day's figures. We only import days Google has finished, so the newest day you see is usually the day before yesterday.

"Data through"

Screens say which day their figures run to, for example "data through 15 Oct 2026". Every period ends on that day. "Last 28 days" means the 28 days up to and including it, not up to today.

With all sites selected, we use the earliest "data through" date among them. That way a site that has not caught up yet does not look like a sudden drop.

The daily routine

Every morning we import the last 14 days again for every site. Google sometimes revises recent days, and this picks up the changes. Once a week we also re-import a longer stretch, to catch later corrections.

After the morning import, reports and topics are recalculated, alerts are checked, running experiments are analysed, the Action plan refreshes, and implemented actions that are due get their review. It is all done by mid-morning UK time.

How much history we keep

How far back your data goes depends on your plan:

• When you connect a site, we import as many days as your plan keeps, up to 16 months. Search Console holds no more than that.
• On plans that keep more than 16 months, history builds up from there as time goes on.

See the plan table in Plans, trials and billing.

How much detail we keep each day

A big site can have hundreds of thousands of pages and searches in Search Console every day. For each site, we keep the most-clicked ones, up to your plan's daily limit:

• Pages. The top pages each day, by clicks.
• Searches. The top searches each day, by clicks. A search counts once for each of your pages it showed, so a search that brought up two of your pages uses two places.

The limits are in the plan table in Plans, trials and billing. For comparison, Search Console's own Performance report shows 1,000 rows.

Site totals, the clicks and impressions for the whole site each day, are never limited. When Search Console had more for a site than your plan keeps, the Sites page says so. The coverage check on the Action plan shows how much of the site's traffic the kept detail covers. See Why the numbers differ from Search Console.

When the limit changes:

• It goes up. Each import from then on keeps more. The daily import redoes the last 14 days and the weekly one goes back further, so recent days fill in. Older days keep the detail they were imported with.
• It goes down. New days are kept to the lower limit, and so are recent days as they are imported again (the nightly update re-imports the last two weeks). Older detail stays until those days pass your plan's history, at the nightly clean-up.

What happens to older data

Each night we delete page and query data older than your plan keeps.

• Upgrade to a plan that keeps more, and we import the missing older days from Search Console automatically, as far back as Search Console still holds them.
• Downgrade, or let a trial end, and the extra history is removed at the next nightly clean-up. Upgrading again imports it back, within the same 16-month limit.

Features that need more history

• Traffic decline in the Action plan and in Reports needs 56 days of history.
• Comparing periods on Pages and Queries needs twice the period you choose.
• Experiments compare the time after a change with the same length of time before it, so the "before" period has to fit inside the history you keep. See Experiments.