Google is deleting your search data, one day at a time
Search Console holds roughly the last 16 months. Everything older is deleted, permanently, and it is gone for everyone: you, your agency, and Google support. Most people discover this at the exact moment they need it.
Last updated 2026-09-04 · The Clode team · Guides
The short version
The 16-month window is rolling: every day, one more day falls off the back. Nothing you do inside Search Console preserves it. The BigQuery export is free and stops the bleeding from the day you switch it on, but never fills in the past. Whatever you decide about tools, the sooner you start keeping a copy, the more of your own history you keep.
What the limit actually is
Search Console gives you about 16 months of performance data on a rolling basis. Today you can compare with last year; in six months you will not be able to compare with the same period this year. It is not a display limit or an export limit. The data itself is removed.
The practical effect is that year-on-year analysis, which is the only honest way to read a seasonal business, is available for a shrinking part of the year and then not at all.
- Search Console still has this
- Already deleted by Google
- Copied the day you connect
- Added by the daily sync
- Room the archive fills: 24 months
- The month you compare with
- The day you connect
Today, Search Console still has all of October 2025. It starts deleting it in February 2027.
Drawn for a property Google has held for at least 16 months. A younger property starts with less. A paid project keeps these 24 months; a free project keeps the most recent 14 days.
Why it costs more than it looks
Seasonality becomes unreadable.
A restaurant, a ski shop or a tax adviser cannot tell a normal January from a bad one without last January.
You cannot prove what worked.
Rewriting a section eighteen months ago and wanting to show the before-and-after: the before is gone.
Slow declines hide.
A drift of a few percent a month is invisible in a 16-month window and obvious in a three-year one.
You inherit nothing.
Taking over a site means taking over 16 months of its history, however old the site is.
The official fix, and its one flaw
Google's answer is the BigQuery bulk export: link Search Console to a Google Cloud project and it writes your daily data into tables you own. It is free to set up, cheap at small volumes, and it genuinely solves the problem going forward.
The flaw is that it only records forward. It starts on the day you enable it and never backfills. Google's own documentation says that to obtain data from before setup you must use the Search Console API. So the sixteen months in your account right now are not rescued by turning it on; they expire on the normal schedule while the export accumulates alongside.
It is still worth switching on today, whatever else you do. It costs almost nothing and it is the only option that keeps working if you stop paying for anything else.
How this works in Clode
Clode starts from the other end. The first sync copies what Google still holds, roughly the last 16 months, so your archive begins with the past that the BigQuery export cannot reach.
The other options, honestly
Export a CSV every month.
Free, and it works, if you actually do it every month for years. The row cap means you only keep the top slice, and you still have to build something to read it.
Write against the API yourself.
Complete, and it can backfill the ~16 months Google still holds. It is a real project: authentication, quota handling, retries, storage, and something to query it with.
A tool that does it for you.
Ours does. It pulls what Google still holds on connection, then appends daily and keeps a rolling 24 months, about eight more than Google, in full daily detail. That is the same API path you would build, already built and already retrying.
Whatever you choose, choose today
This is the rare piece of urgency in marketing that is not manufactured: it is a retention policy, written down by Google, running whether or not anyone is watching. Every day of delay is one more day permanently lost from whatever record you eventually keep.
If you connect Clode, the first sync copies roughly the last 16 months out of the API, your archive starts full, and from then on it holds a rolling 24 months. That is about eight months deeper than Google, not an archive without end. If you set up BigQuery instead, it starts empty today and is complete from tomorrow. Doing neither means the decision has been made for you, one day at a time.