How long Google takes to crawl, index and let a site recover: Gary Illyes' numbers
Google has put numbers on the question every SEO gets from clients: how long until Google notices? On the last day of Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe in Barcelona, Gary Illyes showed a fastest, a typical and a slowest time for each stage of crawling, indexing and serving, based on Google's internal analysis. The slides are not on Google's site yet. The figures below come from the session recap by ROAST, published on October 2, which lists the typical and slowest times.
Crawling and indexing
| Process | Typical | Slowest |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery of a new URL | ~20 hours | Weeks to never |
| Refresh of a known URL | ~30 days | Weeks to never |
| Sitemap processing | ~24 hours | Up to 14 days, or never (quality) |
| robots.txt update | ~24 hours | 25 hours |
| Rendering | Seconds to render, hours in the queue | Days to weeks |
| Indexing, end to end | ~1.5 hours | Months, or never (quality) |
| Canonical change | 1–3 weeks | Months (conflicting signals) |
| Site move | 1–3 months | 6 months to a year or more |
| Structured data update | Hours to 1–2 weeks | Weeks, or never (quality) |
Illyes added a caveat: the stages are linked. A page can't be indexed before it is crawled, so a slow discovery pushes every later step back. "End to end" in the indexing row means every critical process has finished.
Search results and recovery
| Process | Typical | Slowest |
|---|---|---|
| Owner removal in Search Console | ~2 hours | 24 hours |
| Title or snippet change | 1–2 days | Several weeks to months |
| Manual action removal | 1–2 weeks | 4–6 weeks, much longer for dormant sites |
| Recovery after a core update | 3–6 months | 6 months to a year (the next core update) |
| Change after a spam update | 1–2 weeks (continuous) | Months (batch refreshes) |
The recap also notes that core updates take two to four weeks to roll out and spam updates one to two days. The September 2026 spam update is the exception: Google gave it up to two weeks.
"Never" means quality
Several slowest cases end in "never", and in the recap that word is tied to quality. A sitemap that is never processed or a page that is never indexed is usually a page Google doesn't consider worth it, and no technical fix speeds that up. The same day, Illyes said core updates judge content page by page rather than whole domains, which is why one section of a site can rise while another falls.
How to use the table
The numbers line up with Google's own documentation. Its site move guide says most pages of a small to medium site move within a few weeks, and its core update page says confirming that a site has improved can take several months. What the table adds is a typical case to compare against. A canonical change that hasn't settled after three weeks, or a site move still unsettled after three months, has passed the typical range and is worth investigating. A site that has seen no recovery two months after a core update is still early by these numbers.
To see which stage is stuck, use the URL Inspection and Page indexing reports in Search Console, and a crawler from our SEO audit tools for what Google is being shown.