The Search Console BigQuery export is the most capable first-party option there is, and this page won't pretend otherwise. It streams daily performance tables into a dataset you own, holds them for as long as you pay for the storage, and includes the anonymized query rows the API leaves out, which is the only way to reconcile totals against the interface exactly.
People look for an alternative for three reasons, and retention isn't one of them. The export needs a Cloud project with billing enabled, it answers only in SQL, and it starts empty.
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Both keep everything forward, only one looks back
Bulk export begins collecting the day you switch it on. Whatever Search Console still holds for your property, up to 16 months of it, never enters the dataset; it expires on Google's usual schedule while the export accumulates alongside it. Month17 backfills that window on connect. For a property you have owned for years, that is the difference between an archive that starts today and one that starts sixteen months ago.
What each one costs to set up
The bulk export wants a Cloud project, the BigQuery API enabled, a billing account, and a dataset the Search Console service account can write to, repeated for every property. Storage runs cheap for most sites, but the billing account has to exist and stay valid. If it lapses or the permissions change, the export stops, and the days it missed while stopped are not recoverable.
Month17 wants a Google sign-in and a property. That asymmetry is most of why people end up here.
SQL against a model
BigQuery answers in SQL, which is precise and has no ceiling if SQL is a language you write fluently. Month17 puts the archive behind an MCP server with 22 tools, so the question goes to Claude or Cursor in English instead. These are two interfaces onto a similar idea. Pick the one that matches how you actually work, not the one that sounds more rigourous.
When the bulk export is the better tool
Reconciling exact impression counts, keeping search data inside your own cloud for governance reasons, or joining Search Console against other warehouse tables. If any of those is the job, set up the export and don't look back. Runing both is coherent as well: the export feeding your warehouse forward, Month17 holding the rescued back-window and answering the day-to-day questions.
Either way, the useful move is doing it this week instead of next quarter. The export only captures from today, and a backfill only recues what Google still has, which is one day less every day. The data loss calculator shows what that costs you.