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
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)
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)
Here is a graphic of this that I had AI put together:
Here are photos of the slides:
Interesting data - don't you think?
