Google Search Data On Crawling, Indexing & Serving Timelines
Home / Google News / Google SEO / Google Search Data On Crawling, Indexing & Serving Timelines
Google Search Data On Crawling, Indexing & Serving Timelines
Oct 5, 2026 - 7:21 am 1 — by Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz / Executive Editor
Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his expertise in the search marketing industry. He only provides consulting services to expert SEOs and also performs search marketing expert witness services. Barry graduated from the City University of New York and lives with his family in the NYC region. You can follow Barry on Twitter at @rustybrick or on LinkedIn and read his full bio over here. 39,301 Articles as barry.schwartz
Filed Under Google Search Engine Optimization
Gary Illyes from Google reportedly presented new data from Google Search on how long Google for crawling, indexing and serving on average. This is broken down by process, withing crawling, indexing and serving and shows the typical timeframe versus the slowest timeframe.
This was posted by John Campbell at We Are Roast from the three day Google Search Central Live Deep Dive event in Europe. He wrote that the "highlight of the day" was when "Gary Illyes showed Google’s own data on how long things take across crawling, indexing and serving. It was brand new information." French SEO Neil McCarthy also sent me information about this and posted a bit more on LinkedIn.
"Each process had a fastest time, a typical time and a slowest time. The times are based on Google’s internal analysis. One caveat from Gary: many of these processes are linked. E.g. a page can’t be indexed until it has been crawled, so delays stack up," he added.
Gary Illyes told me after I posted this "mind that this was an exercise to see if the audience can relate to the numbers we pulled internally and put in those slides."
Here is the breakdown he posted:
Crawling
| Process | Typical | Slowest | | --------------------- | -------------------- | --------------------------------- | | Discovery (new URL) | \~20 hours | Weeks to never | | Refresh (known URL) | \~30 days | Weeks to never | | Sitemap processing | \~24 hours | Up to 14 days, or never (quality) | | robots.txt update | \~24 hours | 25 hours | | Crawl capacity update | 4 hours to 1–2 weeks | 1–3 weeks (in recovery) | | Crawl demand update | \~20 hours | Weeks to months |
Crawl capacity can drop in seconds when Google backs off, e.g. if your server struggles.
Indexing
| Process | Typical | Slowest | | ----------------------- | ------------------------------------- | ------------------------------- | | Rendering | Seconds to render, hours in the queue | Days to weeks | | Meta annotations | 45–90 minutes | 1–4 days | | Link annotations | Minutes to 1–3 weeks | Months | | Indexing (end to end) | \~1.5 hours | Months or never (quality) | | Removal | 1–3 weeks | Months | | Canonicalisation change | 1–3 weeks | Months (conflicting signals) | | Site move | 1–3 months | 6 months to 1 year+ | | Structured data updates | Hours to 1–2 weeks | Weeks or never (quality) | | Images | Hours to days | Weeks to months | | Videos | Hours to days | Weeks to months (deep analysis) |
End to end means all the critical processes finish successfully. A small site move can be done in a few weeks.
Serving
| Process | Typical | Slowest | | --------------------------------- | ---------------------- | ------------------------------------------- | | Removal in Search Console (owner) | \~2 hours | 24 hours | | Snippet update | 1–2 days | Several weeks to months | | Title update | 1–2 days | Several weeks to months | | Text result image update | 1–2 weeks | Several weeks to months | | Manual action removal | 1–2 weeks | 4–6 weeks, or much longer for dormant sites | | Core update change | 3–6 months to recover | 6 months to 1 year (next core update) | | Spam update change | 1–2 weeks (continuous) | Months (batch refreshes) |
Core updates take 2–4 weeks to roll out. Spam updates roll out in 1–2 days.
Here is a graphic of this that I had AI put together:
Here are photos of the slides:
Interesting data - don't you think?
Previous Story: Google Ads AI Campaign Localization Tool (Beta)
Next Story: Google Ads With Doubled About This Ad Button
The content at the Search Engine Roundtable are the sole opinion of the authors and in no way reflect views of RustyBrick ®, Inc Copyright © 1994-2026 RustyBrick ®, Inc. Web Development All Rights Reserved. This work by Search Engine Roundtable is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.Creative Commons License and YouTube videos under YouTube's ToS.