Help! My Google Search Console Is Not Updating

Logging in to your Google Search Console account and not seeing any new data is incredibly annoying.

In this blog post, we will talk through how you can tell if your Google Search Console is not updating, the possible reasons why it is not updating and what you can do about it.

How can you tell if your Google Search Console is not updating?

When you log into your Google Search Console dashboard, by default you see your “Overview” page. This will give you a snapshot of your page performance report, your page indexing report, your page experience report, and your enhancements report.

If you head to the left-hand side of your screen, and click on “Search results” under the “Performance” section of the toolbar, you will be taken to the full-page performance report. It will look something like this:

In the top right-hand corner of the screenshot above, we have highlighted the wording “Last updated: 53 hours ago”. Being behind by 53 hours can be frustrating especially if you are looking to see the benefit of recent changes to your site. It means there is an issue with Google Search Console showing data. I have seen on some occasions the Google Search Console being out of date by well over 100 hours.

What are the reasons Google Search Console is not updating?

Google do not commit to any service levels in terms of the update times for data so in reality there is not allot you can do about it. There are several possible reasons why though.

Issues with Google Search Console.

The most common reason that Google Search Console is not updating is an issue with Google and their own servers.

The two most common ways of notifying customers about issues with Google Search Console not updating are through the Google Search Central X account, and through Google Search Console.

Issues with reading your website’s sitemap.

Another reason for Google Search Console not updating is an issue with your Sitemap, or at the very least, reading your  XML sitemap.

Aside from you manually asking Google to index your page via the “page submission” tool, Google relies on crawling sitemaps and the web itself to find pages worth indexing and ranking. If your website is particularly new and does not have a lot of backlinks from external sources, it may rely on your sitemap even more to index and rank your pages.

If Google has an issue reading your sitemap, for whatever reason, this could delay Google indexing pages on your website and, therefore, delay showing your data until it has crawled the necessary pages.

Site structure changes.

If your website goes through a major update that sees significant changes to the structure of the website, you may find that Google takes longer than usual to re-crawl your site and, therefore, display your data within Google Search Console.

Due to the sheer size of the web and the number of web pages for Google to crawl, it is highly unlikely Google is going to crawl your website every single day. This is especially true for smaller websites. So if your website has undergone an update and there are lots of pages for Google to re-crawl, you may find a delay in this happening.

This is less of an issue for larger, more active, websites as Google tends to crawl these websites multiple times a day. But if you are a smaller, less active website, then Google may wait longer to re-crawl your site.