Looker Studio and Search Console data retention get conflated constantly, because a dashboard that has been running for two years looks like it holds two years. It holds nothing. The Search Console connector queries the live API every time a report refreshes, so a chart shows whatever Google is willing to serve at that moment.
The 16-month window therefore applies to your dashboards exactly as it applies to the Search Console UI. The left edge of every chart advances by a day, every day, and a report you built last year can't be rebuilt once its dates leave the window. Nothing in Looker Studio warns you when the numbers quietly stop reaching that far back.
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The cache isn't storage
Looker Studio caches connector results for a matter of hours so dashboards stay fast. That is a performance cache and nothing more. Change the date range, edit the chart, or simply wait out the freshness window, and it goes back to the API, where anything older than 16 months comes back empty. No setting fixes this, because the limit belongs to the source rather than to the dashboard.
Extending the range means changing the source
The fix sits upstream of Looker Studio. Point it at storage you control, a BigQuery dataset fed by the bulk export or a warehouse you fill from the API yourself, and the charts reach back as far as that storage does. This is the standard answer and it genuinely works. It also means a Cloud project, a billing account, and a pipeline that somebody keeps alive.
Where Month17 fits, and where it doesn't
Month17 is the storage half of that problem rather than the dashboard half. It archives every performance row daily from the moment you connect, backfills the window Search Console still holds, and keeps all of it with no retention limit.
The tradeoff, stated plainly: Month17 has no dashboard, and no Looker Studio connector. If your reporting has to render in Looker Studio for a client or a board, the bulk export or your own warehouse is the right anwser and this page isn't trying to argue you out of it. What Month17 changes is where the question goes. "Which pages decayed across three years, and was it rankings or CTR" goes to Claude or Cursor over MCP and comes back as an answer rather than a visualiztion.
Keep Looker Studio for the dashboard everyone expects, and start the archive undeneath it. The earliest date you can still reach moves forward again tonight; the data loss calculator shows which ones go next.