SEO Recap covering October 4, 2026: Illyes shares Google Search timing ranges

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Technical SEO

Google's Gary Illyes shares crawling, indexing, and recovery timing ranges
Source: Search Engine Journal

  • The figures come from John Campbell of ROAST recapping Illyes' Oct. 2 session at Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe in Barcelona, with each process listed at fastest, typical, and slowest times from Google's internal analysis. The slides are not on Google's Search Central events page.
  • Typical crawling and indexing timelines:
    • ~20 hours to discover a new URL
    • ~30 days to refresh a URL Google already knows
    • A few weeks for a small site move
    • Up to 2 weeks for pages to leave a duplicate cluster after canonical fixes
  • Search results and recovery timelines:
    • Title and snippet updates: 1-2 days typical, several weeks to months at slowest
    • Search Console removal request: ~2 hours typical, 24 hours at slowest
    • Manual action removal: 1-2 weeks typical, 4-6 weeks at slowest
    • Core update recovery: 3-6 months typical, 6 months to a year at slowest
  • Illyes warned the processes are interconnected, so a page must be crawled before indexing and delays in early stages carry into later ones.
  • The recap gives no sample size, time period, or definition of "typical," omits the fastest times, and lists "never" as the slowest case for 5 processes including sitemap processing, end-to-end indexing, and structured data updates.
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