How data warehousing works

Google Search Console holds 16 months of performance data on a rolling basis. Every day you gain a day at the front and lose a day off the back, and the day that rolls off is deleted permanently rather than archived.

That limit is not arbitrary. Storing per-query, per-page, per-country and per-device data for every verified property on the web is expensive, and Search Console generates no revenue, so capping it is a reasonable commercial decision on Google's side. It just is not a decision you have to live with.

What warehousing changes

• Year-on-year comparisons keep working past the point Google would have deleted the earlier period
• A migration, replatform or core update keeps its before-and-after baseline
• Seasonal patterns can be read across several years rather than inferred from one
• The long tail stays queryable, because the warehouse has no row cap

What it cannot do

History accumulates from the day you connect a property, not retroactively. The backfill can only import what Google still has, so the earliest data you will ever hold for a property is 16 months before you connected it. Warehousing protects the future, it does not recover history that was never stored.