Backup Search Console data today and you keep the 16 months Google still has. Wait until next quarter and you keep 13. The window is rolling: every day the oldest day falls out of it, permanently, in the UI and the API alike.
Nothing about this is recoverable. There is no export of deleted rows and no support ticket that brings them back. A backup only protects the data that exists on the day you start it.
Get early access Free during early access. No card required.
What people try first
The UI export gives you whatever report you happen to be looking at, capped at 1,000 rows per table. Fine for a slide, useless as a backup.
Scheduled scripts against the Search Analytics API work, and plenty of SEOs run one. They also break quietly. A token expires or a cron host dies, and you find out months later that the backup stopped in March. The API also lags two to three days behind real time, so even a correct script has to be written around that.
Looker Studio dashboards look like an archive but read the live API on every refresh. They lose the same 16 months everyone else does.
BigQuery bulk export is the serious first-party option, and it is forward-only. It starts collecting the day you enable it, never backfills, and needs a Cloud project, billing, and SQL before you see a single row again.
What Month17 does instead
You connect your Google account, pick the properties, and Month17 pulls the full 16 months Search Console still holds. From then on it syncs every property daily, straight from Google's API under your own OAuth grant, and keeps every row indefinitely.
- Full backfill on day one, daily sync after that.
- All performance dimensions: queries, pages, countries, devices, search appearance.
- No retention limit on the archived copy.
- The archive answers questions. It sits behind an MCP server, so Claude or Cursor can query the whole history in plain language instead of you digging through CSVs.
It's free during early access, and $10 a month after that. One plan, every feature in it.
Can deleted data be recovered?
No. Once a date leaves the 16-month window, no tool can get it back, including this one. Month17 backfills whatever Search Console still has at the moment you connect, which is why connecting early matters more than picking the perfect tool.
Whichever backup you choose
Start it this week, even if it's a cron job you write yourself. Your site's history has a hard expiry date, and it is sooner than the age of your site suggests. Everything older than 16 months is already gone. This is about the months you still have.