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The Search Console 16 month data limit, report by report

Search Console

Shahid AliSeptember 12, 2026all posts

The Search Console 16 month data limit, report by report

The Search Console 16 month data limit is real, but it only describes one report. People quote it as if the whole product keeps 16 months of everything. It does not. Crawl stats keep 90 days. The links report has no published retention at all. And the hourly view runs on its own separate clock that only started in March 2025. For context, Google is no longer the generous one here: Bing Webmaster Tools moved to 24 months of performance data in August 2025, one of the differences I run through in Search Console vs Bing Webmaster Tools.

I went through Google’s own documentation page by page to build the table below, because the top results for this query all repeat the same single number and stop there.

What does the 16 months actually cover?

Performance data. Clicks, impressions, average position, the query and page rows. Google introduced it in the new Search Console announcement in January 2018:

“With the new report, you’ll have 16 months of data, to make analyzing longer-term trends easier and enable year-over-year comparisons.”

Here is the odd part. The current Performance report help pages no longer state the 16 month limit anywhere. I read them in full on 12 September 2026 looking for it. The clearest current statement from Google sits in an Analytics help page, not a Search Console one:

“Search Console keeps data for the last 16 months. As a result, reports in Analytics also include a maximum of 16 months of data.”

What the Performance help page does say is this: “The default view of the report shows click and impression data for your site … for the past three months.” That default view is why so many people think their history is only three months long. It is not. Change the date range.

The table nobody publishes

How long each Search Console report keeps its data Only two of these six windows are a documented number of days.

REPORT WINDOW

Performance, search results 16 months

Performance, hourly view 16 months, clock started Mar 2025

Crawl stats 90 days

Page indexing no published figure

Links no published figure

BigQuery bulk export forever, from the day you enable it

Two sub-windows sit inside the page indexing report: 404 URLs are only shown if they errored in the past month, and an issue stays listed until 90 days after its last instance was marked as gone.

Windows taken from Google's own help documentation for each report, read on 12 September 2026. Bars are not to scale below 90 days.

The crawl stats documentation is where the 90 day figure comes from: “Only the top 20 child domains that received traffic in the past 90 days are shown.”

The page indexing documentation never publishes an overall window. It publishes two smaller ones: “the Page indexing report shows only URLs that have shown 404 errors in the past month”, and “An issue’s lifetime extends from the first time any instance … until 90 days after the last instance was marked as gone.” Everyone online says the chart holds three months. That is an observation, not a documented figure, and I am not going to repeat it as one.

The 24-hour view is the one that surprises people: “Data history: The filter provides a 16-month history of data, starting from when it was first introduced in March 2025.” So its 16 months are not your site’s 16 months. It has its own start date.

Can I get the data back once it rolls off?

For performance data, no, not from Google. For indexing data, no, at any price, from any tool.

That second half is the part the other results on this query miss. When Google’s page indexing report froze in June 2026 and came back with days missing, John Mueller said plainly that those days are not coming back: “there just isn’t any data for that period, the page indexing report wasn’t updated. We don’t back-fill indexing data.”

That is a different problem from data being delayed. A delay resolves. A gap is permanent. I wrote about how that particular hole appeared in the crawled not indexed reporting bug post.

So any June-over-June comparison of indexed page counts now has no baseline. Not until the window rolls past it in late 2027, which does not fix the comparison, it just stops you being able to attempt it.

The export that actually works

BigQuery bulk export is the only real answer, and it has one property people underestimate:

“Tables are retained forever, by default, as are partitions.”

But it is forward only. Turning it on today gives you today onward and nothing before it. It does not import the 16 months sitting in the interface right now. Enable it in month 14 of a client relationship and you have thrown away 14 months, and you will not feel it for another two, because the interface keeps showing them until they roll off.

The other thing nobody mentions: the export can die silently. From Google’s own docs, “Search Console will retry exporting the missed day’s data for about a week, then stop trying to save data for that day”, and “after about a month of failed export attempts, Search Console will stop the bulk export entirely.” A billing change or an IAM permission change is enough. There is no alert. You find out when you query the table.

What I actually do on every property

This is my routine, and it exists because I have lost data to all three of these failure modes.

  1. BigQuery bulk export on day one. Before anything else, on every property I take over. It is the only step that cannot be done retroactively.
  2. A monthly Search Analytics API pull for any property without billing attached, paginated by startRow, with date, query, page, country and device. Slower than BigQuery, and it has to respect the published API quotas, but it is free.
  3. A quarterly manual CSV of crawl stats and the links report. These are the two Google will not let you export by API, and crawl stats only holds 90 days. Miss one quarter and that quarter is gone. If your crawl stats look empty or your links report is not updating, fix that first, because a stale report you export is still a lost quarter.
  4. A calendar check on the export itself, once a month. Thirty seconds. Query the newest partition and confirm yesterday is in it.

If you only do one of these, do the first. Everything else is recoverable inside the window. The export is the only thing where waiting costs you data you can never buy back.

For what these reports do and do not tell you in the first place, the Search Console indexing status guide covers each status in turn, and the URL Inspection tool compared with the page indexing report covers which of the two to trust when they disagree.

Sources

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