Open Search Console, set the date range to "Last 16 months", and look at the left edge of the chart. That edge is not where your site's history starts. It's where Google stopped keeping it.
Search Console stores performance data (clicks, impressions, CTR, position) for 16 months. The limit applies to the UI and the API equally. Anything older is deleted on a rolling basis. There is no warning and no final export; the rows just fall out of the far end. Your January 2025 data will quietly disappear in May 2026, and nothing in the product will tell you it happened.
Google raised the limit from 90 days to 16 months in 2018 and has not moved it since. Google has never said why it stops there.
What the limit breaks
Year-over-year comparisons go first. Comparing full calendar years, say 2025 against 2024, needs 24 months of data. You can compare a recent month against the same month last year, but push the question back more than a quarter and the baseline has already expired.
Seasonality is next. One Black Friday is an anecdote. To separate a seasonal dip from an actual problem you want two or three complete cycles, and GSC hands you one, sometimes with a bite taken out of the far end.
Then there's core update forensics. When traffic drops and you suspect an algorithm update, the first thing you need is clean data from before it rolled out. If that update is more than 16 months old, the "before" no longer exists, and diagnosis becomes guesswork.
The quietest loss is content decay. Pages rarely die overnight. They leak clicks over two or three years, and inside a 16-month window a page sitting at 60% of its former traffic can look flat and healthy.
Four ways to keep your history
All of them share one hard constraint: nothing is retroactive. Each option preserves data from the day you switch it on, while Google keeps deleting from the far end in the meantime.
Manual exports
The UI exports what a report shows, capped at 1,000 rows per table. You can pull more through the API with a script or a Sheets add-on. This works for a single small site, if you remember to run it every month. In practice nobody remembers by month three.
Looker Studio
The official GSC connector gets mistaken for an archive a lot. It isn't one. It reads the live API on every refresh, so your dashboards show the same 16-month window and lose the same data. Fine for reporting, useless for retention.
BigQuery bulk export
The serious first-party option. Search Console can stream daily performance tables into a BigQuery dataset you own, including long-tail queries the API samples away. The catch: it needs a Google Cloud project, billing enabled, and SQL to get anything back out. It also starts collecting from the day you enable it. There is no backfill of the 16 months you already have.
An API archival service
Tools that call the Search Analytics API on a schedule and store the rows in their own database. On connect they backfill everything GSC still has, then sync daily from there. This is the category Month17 sits in: it archives your properties and serves the whole history over MCP, so you can query it from Claude or Cursor instead of a SQL console.
Whichever option you choose matters less than when you switch it on. Every week of waiting is another week gone from the far end of your window.