Why Google Search Console Reporting Delays Are Not In Search Status Dashboard

As of right now, Google Search Console is having a significant delay with its Performance reports and some are wondering why the status of the delay is not in the Google Search Status Dashboard like other search related issues.

Rüdiger Dalchow asked, “It is now showing a 71 hours update delay and the Google Search Status Dashboard has still no information on this.”

John Mueller from Google replied to this question on LinkedIn explaining that the dashboard is really reserved for core search systems such as crawling, indexing, or ranking (and serving). Since this is just a reporting issue and it has no direct impact on core ranking, it is not included in this report.

Instead, they just confirm the issue on social media and keep us updated there and maybe document it in the data anomalies page.

Here is what John Mueller posted:

We’d track it in the search status dashboard if this were affecting one of the core search systems – like crawling, indexing, or ranking. In this case, it’s “just” reporting, and we don’t track those in the status dashboard. Maybe we should? The incident management process adds quite a bit of overhead, which I don’t think would be appropriate for a relatively / potentially short-term issue like this. I find the datestamp in the UI pretty helpful in at least confirming the age of the data, which is why we added it like that there.

Our process currently has fixed points at which we’d post about it on social media, add an information bar into Search Console, or mention it in the data anomalies page. It’s a balance between unnecessarily alerting people for things they’re not looking at & letting others know that Google’s engineers are working to resolve a pending issue.

So that is why these notices do not go on the Google Search Status Dashboard.

John also joked, “Sorry! Should I check with the team about adding an extra 10% to numbers in the reports after the data is back 🙂 ?”

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.