Data anomalies in Search Console

What's up with my graph?

On rare occasions, there might be an event in Search Console that could affect your report data. For example, if we change our data aggregation methods or there is a logging error, you might see a dip or bump in your chart. This page records known issues that might affect your data.

Product-wide notes

No recent issues

Removals tool

No recent issues

URL Inspection tool

2020

October 14

The "Request Indexing" feature of the URL Inspection Tool has been disabled in order to make some technical updates. We expect it to be re-enabled in the coming weeks. In the meanwhile, Google continues to find and index content through our regular methods, as covered here.

Performance reports (Search results / Discover / Google News)

2024

March 4 onward (Search results)

Google Search has changed the way event rich results appear in Search results. As a result, you may see a drop in clicks and impressions for your event search appearance reported metrics in your performance report. This doesn’t indicate a real drop in traffic, only in the way we categorize it in Search Console.

January 9 (Search results)

Search Console has changed the way it evaluates and counts impressions and clicks for job listing and detail pages. As a result, you may see an increase in clicks and impressions for your job pages. This increase doesn't reflect actual growth, but rather that Search Console is more accurately reporting the number of impressions and clicks across the various job experiences in Search.

2023

November 30

Google Search is now only showing pages in Video mode where the video is the main content of the page. You can expect to see a decrease in the number of pages with indexed videos. This decrease will appear in the number of video impressions in the performance reportvideo indexing report, and the video rich results report in Search Console. Read more in our blog post.

September 13

Google Search is no longer showing How-to rich results on desktop devices. As a result, you will see the number of reported impressions for How-to drop. Read more in the blog post.

August 8

Google Search is showing HowTo and FAQ rich results types less frequently. FAQ rich results will only be shown for a very limited number of sites. HowTo rich results will only be shown on desktop devices. As a result, you will see the number of reported impressions for these types drop.  Read more in the blog post. 

May 4-17

A bug in Google Search caused a drop in video traffic from May 4 to May 17, and has since been resolved.

April 13

Google now only shows video thumbnails next to Google search results when the video is the main content of the page. You may see a change in search appearance reported metrics for videos in the performance report, video indexing report, and video rich results report. Read more about the change in the blog post.

April 5 onward

Google Search has started showing fewer FAQ rich results in Search. As a result, you may see a decrease in FAQ search appearance reported metrics in the performance report. This is an intentional change. Note that Google does not guarantee that your structured data will show up as rich results in search results. 

January 6 onward (Search results)

Sites may see an increase in impressions and clicks for Product results search appearance type on their site. This is because Google now includes products found only in page content, without associated Product structured data. 

2022

December 6 (Search results)

Google created an additional search result feature for sites that use Subscribe with Google. As a result, these websites may see an increase in impressions and clicks in the Search Performance report.

November 28 (Discover)

Google has improved their system for counting Discover clicks and impressions. As a result, you might see an increase in your Discover data that more accurately reflects your site's appearance in Discover.

October 28 (Search results, no annotation)

Google released a fix to a bug that primarily affected some search features, such as Top Stories, and that became most noticeable around October 18-19. The bug fix will take about a week to fully roll out.

October 23 (Discover)

A logging error caused a drop in Discover data on this day. This did not reflect a change in actual traffic, only an issue with data logging.

September 21 (Search results)

Due to a logging error, sites may see a small drop in data for this day. This is a logging issue only; it does not reflect changes in search performance or user behavior. We hope to replace most of the missing data soon.

August 22 (Search results)

Google began upgrading some review-type results to product-type results in Search, and has been able to generate some new product type results. As a result, you might see a decrease in your Review snippet impressions (and clicks) and an increase in your Product results impressions (and clicks). This represents both a change in how these items looked in Search as well as where Search Console assigns these impressions and clicks.

July 26 (Discover)

Due to a logging error, site owners might see a drop in their Discover clicks and impressions during this period. This is only a logging error, it is not a drop in actual views or clicks.

May 12-26 (Google News)

Because of a logging error, site owners might see a drop in their Google News data during this period. This is just a logging error and not a real drop in Google News performance.

May 13

Search Console now logs impressions in the Page Experience report for additional desktop features, such as Top Stories. As a result, you may see an increase in your desktop impressions in the Page Experience report, as well as in the Search and News performance reports when filtering by the "Good Page Experience" search appearance. This doesn't represent an increase in total impressions, but only a re-labeling of known and counted impressions.

Feb 1-3

Performance metrics suffered a logging issue on analytics for Search, Discover, and Google News. As a result, you may see some discrepancies in your performance data during this period. This is only a logging issue; it does not reflect a change in either user behavior or search results on Google.

January 24-27

Search data for images is affected by a logging issue that might cause you to see a drop in clicks and impressions for images on your site in the Performance report. We're working on resolving this issue. This issue is a logging issue only; it does not reflect a drop in either user behavior or search results on Google.

January 15 (Search)

The Page Experience report now includes desktop data in addition to mobile data (yay!). As a result, if you filter your search performance results to Good page experience you might see an increase in impressions with all that additional desktop data.

Dec 12 - Jan 13 (Search)

Because of a logging error, site owners might see a drop in their Product results search appearance data during this period. This is just a logging error - there was no drop in either user behavior or search results on Google.

2021

December 9 (Google News)

Google has recently updated its logging system for Google News to make it more accurate. You may notice a reduction in the number of impressions for your site in the performance report for Google News. These improvements are to ensure you receive the most accurate report on impressions from Google News via Search Console and don’t reflect any changes in user behavior on the Google News app or news.google.com.

November 10 (Search)

Due to a logging error, you may see an decrease in the number of clicks and impressions for the Good Page Experience search appearance when the "News" search type filter is applied. This change does not reflect a change in user behavior or search results, only a change in Search Console logging.

June 29 - November 1 (Search)

Search Console was overcounting data for Page Experience search appearance data during this period. On November 2 you should see a return to correct data.

September 13 onward (Search)

Due to a logging change, you may see an increase in the number of clicks and impressions for Good Page Experience search appearance for the "News" search type filter. This change does not reflect a change in user behavior or search results, only a change in Search Console logging.

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.

July 21–27 (Search)

Due to an internal issue, you may see a drop in your Review snippet and Product rich results performance during this period. We regret any problems this may have caused on your site.

April 6 (Search)

Search Console improved the algorithm for counting image impressions in Search results. As a result, you may see a small drop in your image impressions in Search. This is not a drop in actual impressions, just a more accurate calculation of image impressions when type=image is specified in the Search Performance report.

February 16 (Discover)

Previously, if a viewer clicked into a Web Story on Discover, then continued from there into additional Web Stories, only the first Web Story was credited with an impression and click. From this date onward, any additional Web Stories that were reached from the first Web Story in Discover will also be credited with an impression and click in the Performance report for Discover. Therefore, you might see an increase in your Discover data.

2020

October 28 (Discover)

A previous issue in which some Discover data were mis-classified as video in the Performance report has been fixed. Because of this, you may see a drop in your Discover report's video appearance statistics. This mis-classification did not affect Discover results for users, only the data reporting.

October 6 (Discover)

Following the launch of the Stories carousel feature on Discover, you might see a significant increase in Web Story stats on Discover reporting for your site.

September 25-28 (Discover)

Web Stories were shown less often to Discover users during this period, so you will see a drop in impressions and clicks for this type in the Performance report for Discover.

Crawl Stats Report

2021

December 6-14

An internal issue caused an increase of redirect errors during indexing, and associated email notifications. This was not due to any website issues, but was due to an internal Google issue. Pages that were dropped from the index have been scheduled for recrawling.

March 10-23

You may see a drop in data in this period due to an internal reporting issue. This issue did not affect actual page fetches, only the reporting of fetch activity during this period.

January 16 onward

The crawl stats report has increased its reporting coverage for additional types of crawls. As a result, you may see a jump in the number of crawls reported for your site. This does not reflect additional crawling of your site, only improved reporting.

Mobile Usability Report

2023

November 17

The number of items reported here dropped due to a temporary reporting issue. This issue has since been resolved and the numbers will return in the near future.

Page Indexing Report

2023

July 2 onward

Additional, more fine-grained page indexing issue information is now available. As a result, you may see a rise in the portion of issues being reported on. This is not a change in the processing of your website for Search, it is purely a reporting improvement.

2022

August 17

Search Console has corrected an internal problem where our systems were mislabeling the index status of some pages. As a result, some sites may see a decrease in the number of indexed URLs on their site. This does not reflect a change in user behavior, only a correction in the reporting.

2021

December 6-14

An internal issue caused an increase of redirect errors during indexing, and associated email notifications. This was not due to any website issues, but was due to an internal Google issue. Pages that were dropped from the index have been scheduled for recrawling.

January 9

Additional, more fine-grained index coverage statuses are now available. This will cause some pages in the report to be relabeled with the new, more specific categories (for example, "Crawl anomaly" is no longer reported, and has been replaced with more specific issues). As a result, you will see the appearance of new status types in your report, although the total number of items in each category (error, warning, valid, excluded) should not change significantly, only the status descriptions of any labeled items. Read more about this feature in the blog.

2020

Sept 1

An internal systems error caused a delay in processing index coverage information. No data has been lost, and the report will show accurate data after processing is complete.

Video Indexing report

2023

November 30

Google Search is now only showing pages in Video mode where the video is the main content of the page. You can expect to see a decrease in the number of pages with indexed videos. This decrease will appear in the number of video impressions in the performance reportvideo indexing report, and the video rich results report in Search Console. Read more in our blog post.

June 12

In order to help you better understand issues with video indexing, Search Console will start reporting more specific issues with clear actions to help you make your videos more prominent on Search. You may see the following change in your Video indexing report:

  • Decrease in issue "Google could not determine the prominent video on the page"
  • Increase in issues "Video outside the viewport", "Video too small", and "Video too large"

Read more.

April 17

When providing an inline data URL instead of a video URL, Search Console will now report a new issue ("Inline data URLs cannot be used for video URLs"). As a result, you may see a reassignment of the "Invalid video URL" issue to the new issue. The total number of affected videos should remain the same.

January 19

Search Console can now more accurately classify thumbnail indexing issues. As a result, you may see a reassignment of "Missing thumbnail" issues to more specific issue types. The total number of affected videos should remain the same.
AMP enhancement report

2023

November 17

The number of items reported here dropped due to a temporary reporting issue. This issue has since been resolved and the numbers will return in the near future.

2021

January 19 onward

Search Console has added a check for a new AMP issue type: disallowed !important CSS qualifier. As a result, you may see an increase in the total number of AMP issues reported for your site. This doesn't necessarily indicate new errors on your site, only that we are now checking for this error.

2020

August 18 onward

The report has been updated to include Signed Exchange related issues. This change does not affect Search results, only the data reporting in Search Console. Read more.

Rich result reports

2024

March 6

Recipe

Search Console is now reporting on two new properties in the Recipes rich result report: recipeInstructions and recipeIngredient. As a result, you may see an increase in warnings for your Recipe items. See the Recipe documentation for more information on specifying these fields.

2023

November 30

Videos

Google Search is now only showing pages in Video mode where the video is the main content of the page. You can expect to see a decrease in the number of pages with indexed videos. This decrease will appear in the number of video impressions in the performance reportvideo indexing report, and the video rich results report in Search Console. Read more in our blog post.

November 27

Q&A

Google Search is now recommending new properties for Q&A pages: author and datePublished. As a result, you may see an increase in warnings for your Q&A items. See the Q&A documentation for more information on specifying the new fields.

November 17

The number of items reported here dropped due to a temporary reporting issue. This issue has since been resolved and the numbers will return in the near future.

September 13

Google Search is no longer showing How-to rich results on desktop devices. As a result, you will see the number of reported impressions for How-to drop. Read more in the blog post.

August 8

Google Search is showing HowTo and FAQ rich results types less frequently. FAQ rich results will only be shown for a very limited number of sites. HowTo rich results will only be shown on desktop devices. As a result, you will see the number of reported impressions for these types drop.  Read more in the blog post. 

June 8

Breadcrumb

Search Console started to show a warning when sites use the HTML id attribute to specify an ID for Breadcrumb structured data. As a result, you may see an increase in warnings in your Breadcrumb report. See the Breadcrumb documentation for more information on how to specify IDs.

May 4

Video

The description property is no longer required for Video structured data items (though it's still strongly recommended to help Google better understand the content of your video). As a result, the missing description issue will no longer appear as a critical issue, and you may see an increase in the number of valid Video structured data items in your Video rich result report.

2022

October 25

Many rich result types

Some structured data issues were mislabeled as errors, when in fact they are warnings. Search Console will relabel them correctly in your reports. As a result, these issues will move from the critical error table to the warning table in your rich result reports. (The issue count in the critical errors table will drop to zero, and that issue will be added to the warnings table with the pre-zero count.) This is strictly a reporting issue and did not affect whether or not a rich result could be displayed in Google Search results.

September 12

Product snippet

Product rich results are now called Product snippet. Some properties are no longer required for Product snippet rich results. As a result, you may see a drop in errors and warnings for your Product snippet items. Read more in the blog post.

August 22

Review and Product

Google began upgrading some review-type results to product-type results in Search. As a result, impressions (and clicks) on reclassified items will also migrate from the Review report to the Product report over time. Affected sites will see a decline in impressions in the Reviews report and a corresponding rise in impressions in the Products report. Total item counts of each type will not change, however, since Search Console did not reclassify correctly labeled structured data items. This represents both a change in how these items looked in Search as well as where Search Console assigns these impressions and clicks.

March 28

All rich reports

Search Console changed the naming pattern of many structured data issues to include the name of the containing element in the issue name. As a result, we are closing all affected issues and opening the equivalent issues with the new naming pattern. You will not see any change in the number of affected entities on your site as a result of this, but you will see the changes in your issue history. We have suppressed any email notifications for this change. We hope you find the new issue naming schema useful. Read more in the blog post.

March 22

Events

Google will start enforcing location requirements for events. For events marked as virtual only (eventAttendanceMode = OnlineEventAttendanceMode), providing any physical locations will trigger a warning. For any event with a physical address, the address must be of type Place, not PostalAddress, or it will be an error. Therefore you might see an increase in errors and warnings in Event items on your site.

January 31

Breadcrumb and HowTo

Search Console has changed the way that it evaluates and reports errors in Breadcrumbs and HowTo structured data. As a result, you may see changes in the number of Breadcrumbs and HowTo entities and issues reported for your property, as well as a change in severity of some issues from errors to warnings.

2021

December 28

Product

Search Console has changed the way that it evaluates and reports errors in Product structured data. As a result, you may see changes in the number of Product entities and issues reported for your property, as well as a change in severity of some issues from errors to warnings.

December 14

Review snippet

Previously, top-level schema.org/Rating objects were counted as reviews in the Review Snippets rich results report. This is no longer the case. As a result, you may see a reduction in the number of Review objects in this report.

October 19

Review

Google is now enforcing the 99 character limit on author names in the review rich results. Because of this, you may see an increase in the number of errors in your review rich results.

October 18

Job posting

Search Console has changed the way that it evaluates and reports errors in Job Posting structured data. As a result, you may see small increases in the number of Job entities and issues reported for your property, as well as a change in severity of some issues from errors to warnings.

September 29

Product

Search Console now provides more granularity in error reporting for Product structured data items. As a result, many issues involving incorrect formatting that were formerly marked as invalid object are now marked more specifically with invalid type or format categories.

May 10

Event

Search Console has changed the way that it evaluates and reports errors in Event structured data. As a result, you may see small increases in the number of Event entities and issues reported for your property, as well as a change in severity of some issues from errors to warnings. Specifically, Search Console is now detecting Event entities at all hierarchy levels, not just at the root level, and errors in recommended properties are now flagged as warnings rather than errors.

March 11

Job posting

Search Console has changed the requirements for the Education, Experience, and ExperienceInPlaceOfEducation properties of job posting markup. Therefore you may see an increase in warnings for Job Posting instances on your property. See more details about the updated requirements in the Job Posting documentation.

March 2

Q&A and FAQ

Search Console now checks the validity of FAQ and Q&A structured data that is below the root entity level. Previously, we only checked entities at the root level. Therefore, you may see an increase in valid/warning/invalid FAQ and Q&A items to reflect an accurate count of root and nested entities that we found on your site.

February 1

The data-vocabulary.org format is no longer supported by Google for rich results. All warnings about usage of data-vocabulary.org structured data will now appear as errors in your rich results reports. Therefore you might see a decrease in warnings and increase in errors in your reports. There is no penalty for using data-vocabulary.org data, but it will not be used to generate rich results.

2020

August 26

Dataset

Search Console began marking as "warning" any Dataset object that is missing the recommended property creator. Therefore you may see an increase in warnings for Dataset instances on your website.

July 1 onward

Video

Search Console began marking as "warning" any Video object that is missing both embedUrl and contentUrl properties. This is not a change in requirements or behavior, but an improvement in our reporting system to better reflect the actual indexing behavior. Video objects that are missing both embedUrl and contentUrl properties can still appear as rich results but additional content based features of videos such as animated previews and key moments may not work. Therefore you might see an increase in warnings in Video items on your site. To fix this issue, define either of these two properties in your Video object. (Note that this does not affect Video items embedded within other types, such as Video within Recipe.)

Core Web Vitals

2023

November 17

The number of items reported here dropped due to a temporary reporting issue. This issue has since been resolved and the numbers will return in the near future.

March 27

You may see a change in the number of URLs in your Core Web Vitals report. This is because more URLs are now being reported on due to a new origin group that contains data for URLs that previously fell below the data threshold. Learn more about URL groups.

2021

June 1

The CLS metrics have been updated to reflect a more accurate representation of layout shifts on the page. CLS metric now has a maximum session window with 1 second gap, capped at 5 seconds as detailed in the post here. You might see changes in your page CLS statuses (mostly positive) reflecting this change.

April 13

The CLS metrics have been updated to reflect a more accurate representation of layout shifts on the page. You might see changes in your page CLS statuses (mostly positive) reflecting this change.

February 17

The metrics defining the boundaries for LCP, FID, CLS, which used to be < (less than), are now defined as <= (less than or equal to). Therefore you might see a change in statuses (for the better) in this report.

Page experience report

2022

May 13

Search Console now logs impressions in the Page Experience report for additional desktop features, such as Top Stories. As a result, you may see an increase in your desktop impressions in the Page Experience report, as well as in the Search and News performance reports when filtering by the "Good Page Experience" search appearance. This doesn't represent an increase in total impressions, but only a re-labeling of known and counted impressions.

2021

June 29 - November 1

Search Console was overcounting mobile Page Experience data during this period. On November 1 you should see a return to correct data.

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