Google Search Console Only Shows 35% Of Your Data? It Depends.

When Google announced the new Google Search Console recommendations, one of the examples of the recommendations was to bulk export your data because “Search Console only shows 35% of your performance data.” Now, this is not new, we knew Google anonymized way too much of your data in Search Console, but now Google is showing how much in this example report.

In July of 2022, we reported on average about 50% of queries in Search Console are hidden. Google did not deny it back then, in fact, they updated their documentation to explain the data limits and the anonymization of data that they perform.

In any event, this seems to come as news to many since it is now in plain sight in the new recommendations section (that still most of you do not see).

John Mueller of Google responded to the latest on the 35% figure saying on LinkedIn (comments section) “Most sites see all / most of their data.” I guess the larger sites see less?

He wrote, “The number really depends on the site.” The recommendation in the screenshot above will only show when Google thinks the percentage is high enough, “We show this recommendation when we think there’s enough difference,” he wrote.

He also added, “Also, there’s nuance: even when not all data is shown individually (individual rows), the graph on top is fine. Using the API also gets you more data, so using something like Search Analytics for Sheets will get most folks far enough. Focus on the actionable level of data that you actually need – there are options to do more, but most folks probably don’t need it.”

Plus, that 35% number can be different for each site. Like the study above said, it was closer to 50% of most sites Ahrefs tracks, at least back in 2022. “It really depends on the site – it’s not a fixed percentage,” Mueller wrote.

So this should not come as new, if you wanted all your data, you should have always exported it. But that being said, if you see this recommendation, then maybe you should export your data. If you don’t see the recommendation, maybe you should export your data and compare to see how low the percentage has to be to know when Google may show this notification.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.

Update: After I posted this here, John Mueller commented on Mastodon saying:

Yes, not new. This is what the recommendations are useful for – letting folks know when they could potentially tweak their processes, especially if there’s something which they might have otherwise missed. Not everything will be actionable, not everyone wants to do (or has time for) everything they could do. Maybe we should call it ICYMI 🙂