Google Search Console Performance Reports Data Lost & Won’t Be Backfilled

Last week, we reported that the performance report in Google Search Console for the dates of August 23rd and 24th had missing data. We were hoping Google would be able to retrieve and backfill the data, but it seems the data is lost forever and will not be backfilled.

John Mueller from Google seemed to confirm the worse case scenario for this outcome on Twitter saying “it looks like this is really data loss and won’t be back-filled.” He said sometimes in the “past we’ve looked at just adding interpolated data, but imo that’s iffy (especially with keywords, etc).” I hate when Google interpolated data, i.e. used previous days of data to fill it in, it is just not real.

Here is John’s tweet:

Sometimes we can rebuild it, sometimes there’s just data loss. From the wording on the annotation, it looks like this is really data loss and won’t be back-filled. In the past we’ve looked at just adding interpolated data, but imo that’s iffy (especially with keywords, etc).

— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) August 31, 2021

The specific notice from Google said “August 23-24 (Search, Discover): An internal problem caused a data loss in Search and Discover performance during this period. Users might see a significant data drop in their performance reports during this period. This does not reflect any drop in clicks or impressions for your site, only missing data in Search Console.”

The charts can look pretty bad for some sites:

And normal for others – but even if it looks normal for you, you are probably missing some data. So keep that in midn.

Forum discussion at Twitter.