The Google Search Status Dashboard is a public web page, at status.search.google.com, where Google records confirmed problems in the systems behind its search engine and logs each ranking update from start to finish. It exists because site owners and marketers watch traffic move and need some way to tell whether the cause lies in their own pages or inside Google. The page opened on December 14, 2022, replacing a habit of announcing incidents in ad hoc social media posts.

Entries are written by Google staff, not generated automatically, and carry a start time, an affected product and, once the matter closes, an end time. Ranking arrived later than the other products and now dominates: as of October 8, 2026, eight of the nine incidents in the page's JSON feed were ranking updates, and only one was a fault.

What the dashboard records

The four products follow the path of a web page through Search. Crawling is the fetching of pages by Googlebot, Google's web crawler. Indexing is the stage where a fetched page is parsed, assessed and stored for retrieval. Rankingorders stored documents for a given query, and Serving is the delivery of results to the person searching. A catalogue file on the site lists these four products and no others.

Every entry carries one of four status labels, shown in a legend on the page: Available, Service information, Service disruption and Service outage. Google's help documentation defines the last three. Service information marks a change, such as a ranking update starting to roll out. Service disruption means sites may see degraded performance because of a shared third-party dependency, with DNS servers given as the example. Service outage means a system is largely not working for many sites or users. In the JSON feed, eight of the nine incidents carry service information with low severity. The ninth, a serving incident on February 24, 2026 that lasted 15 minutes, is the only service disruption and is rated medium.

Google describes four stages. Its Search Relations team watches internal monitoring and community feedback, and posts when a problem is widespread. Engineers then seek a root cause, follow-up posts report scale, regions and the time of the next update, and the entry closes with a mitigation or fix. A problem counts as fixed only when Google is confident its changes will end the impact, although sites can stay affected until they are reprocessed.

At launch, Google said it aimed to post within an hour of confirming a problem and to follow up within 12 hours, according to 9to5Google. The recorded start is the moment of confirmation, according to Search Engine Land, not necessarily when the fault began. Reports are kept for five years, an Atom feed carries updates, and all times are US Pacific, so 09:15 PDT equals 16:15 UTC.

A recent entry shows the format. The September 2026 spam update was logged as an "Incident affecting Ranking" starting on September 24, 2026 at 09:15 PDT, with a note that the rollout may take up to two weeks. A spam update marks the moment Google ships an improvement to SpamBrain, its spam-detection system.

Origin and evolution

Before 2022, Google reported Search incidents through posts on its Twitter accounts. Those posts had no template and were written from scratch each time. Gary Illyes of Google's Search Relations team said on the Search Off the Record podcast that the dashboard honoured a promise made in 2019, after major search outages, according to Search Engine Journal. His colleague Lizzi Sassman said the hardest part of earlier outage posts was agreeing wording and timing among many approvers.

The launch came on December 14, 2022, with a Search Central blog post and a podcast episode the same day. The first version covered crawling, indexing and serving, and showed widespread problems from the previous seven days, according to Search Engine Land. Illyes said Google would watch how it worked before adding features such as Top Stories, that Discover and Google News would need a separate version, and that posts would not be translated.

In March 2023 Google said on Twitter that a ranking section was coming, listing active and past algorithm updates, including the then-active March 2023 core update, according to Search Engine Land. The announcement promised history back to 2020. The ranking history page, as retrieved on October 8, 2026, lists 42 entries, the oldest being the November 2021 spam update, which began on November 3, 2021. Google's help page puts retention at five years, which is consistent with that, and the older ranking-updates page now redirects to this history. The history also holds a February 2026 Discover update that ran for 21 days and 17 hours, although Illyes had said in 2022 that Discover would need its own version.

Why it matters to marketers

For marketing teams the dashboard is the only official timestamp for a ranking change, and entries often arrive with little else. Google published no companion blog post for the May 2026 core update, which the dashboard logged at 08:40 US/Pacific on May 21, 2026. The Search Central post for the September 2026 spam update added little. PPC Land's report on the March 2026 core update gives an incident start of 02:00 PT on March 27, 2026, with the release logged at 02:14 PDT.

Duration matters as much as the start, because it fixes the window in which traffic changes can be attributed to Google. The March 2026 spam update closed in about 19.5 hours, the June update in about two days and the August update, logged at 09:27 Pacific on August 18, 2026, in about two days and 16 hours. The September update, at 13 days and 16 hours, was the longest of the four. Core updates run longer: the December 2025 core update took 18 days and the June 2025 core update about 16. John Mueller of Google said on March 31, 2026 that Google generally does not announce stages of core updates, so the dashboard offers a start, an end and little between.

Third-party data shows what is at stake. SE Ranking figures published on April 15, 2026 found that 79.5% of URLs in the top three positions changed place after the March 2026 core update, against 66.8% after the December 2025 one, as PPC Land reported. That update overlapped with a spam update that began three days earlier. Separate dashboard entries, on March 24 and March 27, fix the overlap window.

Limitations and open disputes

The dashboard is narrow by design. Illyes told the podcast that the team was "only focusing on major incidents", according to Search Engine Journal. Google's help page adds that problems isolated to a few pages, searchers or sites are left off, and directs site owners to the Search Central help community.

Gaps follow. Google acknowledged a crawl dip in August 2025 through a post by Mueller on Bluesky on August 28, and PPC Land's report describes no dashboard entry. Malte Ubl, chief technology officer of Vercel, had reported a 30% fall in the global Googlebot crawl rate. Problems in Search Console data are tracked elsewhere: performance reports stopped updating on October 19, 2025, and the report cites no official Google communication.

Timing is also uncertain. A serving incident on October 3, 2025 began at 1:00 PM Pacific, and Google posted the notice at 2:21 PM. Posts are manual and start times mark confirmation, so the lag between a fault and its record cannot be read from the page.

Entries describe timing, not effect. They do not name affected sites or the signals changed, and Google's help page says action is often unnecessary after an update is posted. Practitioner data points elsewhere: SE Ranking found that 24.1% of pages once in the top 10 fell out of the top 100 after the March 2026 core update, against 14.7% after December 2025. The dashboard offers nothing to reconcile the two. Every entry is also Google's own account, so independent checking depends on outside rank trackers.

Not the same as

Data Anomalies in Search Console is a page recording known errors in that tool's own reports, such as a logging error that distorted impressions from May 13, 2025 and was acknowledged on April 3, 2026, or a Discover logging error on May 21, 2026, disclosed on May 27. The status page concerns Google's systems; the anomalies page concerns what Search Console reports about them.

Manual actions are penalties that Google reviewers apply to individual sites, notified in Search Console. The dashboard names no sites and records no penalties.

The Merchant Center Status Dashboard is a separate service covering Merchant Center, the Content API for Shopping and product feeds. PPC Land reported its launch on February 6, 2022, ten months before the Search version appeared.

Third-party volatility trackers, such as the SE Ranking and Sistrix data used in coverage of the March 2026 core update, measure effects. The dashboard shows when Google says a change began and ended.

Recent developments

The September 2026 spam update has closed. PPC Land's report at its launch noted that the entry carried no end time. The dashboard now shows it closed, with a last update stamped 01:37 PDT today and a duration of 13 days and 16 hours. That is close to the two weeks Google had allowed, and about five times the August update.

The year has produced seven ranking entries so far: one Discover update, two core updates and four spam updates. The ranking history page lists four entries for all of 2025.

Timeline

  • 2019: Google, after major search outages, promises clearer incident communication, according to Gary Illyes
  • November 3, 2021: oldest entry in the dashboard's ranking history, the November 2021 spam update, which ran for 8 days and 1 hour
  • December 14, 2022: Google launches the Search Status Dashboard, covering crawling, indexing and serving, with a Search Central blog post and a Search Off the Record episode
  • March 2023: Google announces a ranking section listing active and past algorithm updates
  • June 30 to July 17, 2025: June 2025 core update runs for about 16 days
  • October 3, 2025: serving incident begins at 1:00 PM Pacific and is posted at 2:21 PM
  • December 11 to 29, 2025: December 2025 core update runs for 18 days and 2 hours
  • February 5, 2026: February 2026 Discover update begins and runs for 21 days and 17 hours
  • February 24, 2026: serving incident lasts 15 minutes
  • March 24, 2026: March 2026 spam update runs for 19 hours and 30 minutes
  • March 27, 2026: March 2026 core update begins and runs for 12 days and 4 hours
  • May 21, 2026: May 2026 core update begins and runs for 11 days and 21 hours
  • June 24, 2026: June 2026 spam update runs for 2 days and 1 hour
  • August 18, 2026: August 2026 spam update runs for 2 days and 16 hours
  • September 24, 2026: September 2026 spam update begins at 09:15 PDT
  • October 8, 2026: dashboard shows the September 2026 spam update closed after 13 days and 16 hours

Summary

Who: Google's Search Relations team writes the entries, with Search engineers diagnosing causes. Readers include site owners, SEO and analytics teams, publishers and marketers who need to date a traffic change.

What: A public status page for Google Search that logs confirmed, widespread incidents in crawling, indexing and serving, and records each ranking update, including core, spam and Discover updates, with start time, duration and a status label.

When: Launched on December 14, 2022, extended with a ranking section from March 2023, and as of October 8, 2026 showing the September 2026 spam update closed after 13 days and 16 hours.

Where: At status.search.google.com, with an Atom feed and JSON history files. Times are in US Pacific time, and Google's older ranking-updates page redirects there.

Why: Google created it to replace unstructured incident posts on social media. For marketers it provides the only official timestamp for a ranking change, though entries state timing rather than effect and leave out isolated or small-scale problems.