If you open the page indexing report in Search Console and scroll the chart back to June 2026, you will find days with no data at all. Not zero. Nothing. The line simply stops and starts again.
This surfaced publicly on 11 September 2026, three months after it happened, which tells you how rarely anyone looks that far back in that particular report. Google has now confirmed what it means, and the answer is worse than a bug: those days are gone permanently.
What Google said
John Mueller responded to the reports directly:
“This is likely from the time in June where the data was delayed - there just isn’t any data for that period, the page indexing report wasn’t updated. We don’t back-fill indexing data. I’ll check w/the team when they’re back from holidays to be sure.”
Four sentences, and the third one is the whole story. We don’t back-fill indexing data. Not a promise to fix it later. A statement that there is nothing to fix, because the data was never recorded in the first place.
The timeline
Dates from Google's own Search Console announcements of the June delay and its resolution, and from Mueller's September statement.
It is not in the data anomalies list
Google keeps a data anomalies page for exactly this situation. It is where logging and reporting glitches get recorded so you know not to chase a drop that was never real.
I checked it on 12 September 2026. Under Page indexing it still says “No recent issues.” The June outage is not listed there and never was.
That matters more than it sounds. If you are auditing a site in 2027 and you find a blank stretch in June 2026, the official reference that exists precisely to explain blank stretches will tell you nothing happened. You will go looking for a cause on the site. There is no cause on the site.
What this actually costs you
Nothing today. Plenty later, and only in one specific way.
You lose year over year comparison on indexed page counts for that window, permanently. If you want to know whether a site had more or fewer pages indexed in late June 2026 than in late June 2025, there is no answer, and no tool can produce one. Third party rank trackers do not hold Google’s indexing data. Neither does the BigQuery bulk export, which only carries performance data.
This is a different category of problem from the ordinary case of Search Console data being delayed. Delays resolve. They always have. This did not resolve, and that is the thing to take away: a delay in the page indexing report is not guaranteed to be temporary.
It also sits on top of an existing measurement problem, which is that the 16 month data limit works differently in every report. The page indexing report does not even have a published retention window. Now it has a documented hole in it as well.
What to do
Four things, in order, and none of them take long.
- Look at your own chart now. Page indexing report, date range set as far back as it goes. If June 2026 has a break in it, that is this. You do not need to investigate further.
- Write it down somewhere your future self will find it. A note in the client document, a comment in the reporting sheet, anything. The whole risk here is that someone reads the gap as a real drop eighteen months from now.
- Screenshot the current chart before the window rolls. It is the only record that the gap existed, since Google’s own anomalies page does not carry it.
- Stop treating the page indexing chart as your source of truth for history. Take your own monthly count. I export indexed page totals per property on the first of each month, and this event is the reason why. It took one client conversation in July about a dip that turned out to be nothing for me to decide the report was not enough on its own.
If you are reading the report for anything other than history, the Search Console indexing status guide explains what each status is actually telling you, and the crawled not indexed reporting bug post covers the other recent case where the report showed something that was not happening on the site.
Sources
- Google Search Console indexing report missing June data, Search Engine Land, September 2026. Mueller’s statement in full, including “We don’t back-fill indexing data.”
- Data anomalies in Search Console, Google Search Console Help. Checked 12 September 2026. Page indexing still reads “No recent issues.”
- Page indexing report, Google Search Console Help. What the report records, and the sub-windows inside it.
- Bulk data export, Google Search Console Help. Confirms the export carries performance data, not indexing data.