What the dashboard covers
Google's help page describes the dashboard as showing "issues that affect many sites or users" and the latest ranking updates (Google Search Central, Search Status Dashboard help, updated December 10, 2025). It tracks four systems:
| System | What an entry means | Example of what you might see |
|---|---|---|
| Crawling | Googlebot has trouble fetching pages across many sites | Fewer crawl requests in your Crawl Stats report |
| Indexing | New or updated pages are slow to enter the index | Fresh pages missing from Google for days |
| Serving | Results are not shown correctly to searchers | Odd or missing results for a while |
| Ranking | A ranking update is rolling out | Positions shifting across many queries |
What it does not cover: anything that affects only your site or a few sites. Google's help page says to ask in the Google Search Central help community if your issue is not listed.
The status labels
Each system shows one of four states:
- Available: working as normal.
- Information: a change is rolling out. Ranking updates appear this way.
- Disruption: degraded performance for many sites.
- Outage: the system is largely not working, affecting many sites or users.
All times are in US Pacific time, as the dashboard notes at the bottom of the page.
Where to find ranking updates
- Open status.search.google.com.
- Click Ranking to open its history page: the Ranking history.
- Each row is one update, named by month and type ("May 2026 core update"), with the start date and the total duration once it is done.
- Click a row to see the timeline: the start note, any updates, and the final note when the rollout is complete.
Google keeps entries on the Summary and History pages for five years, so you can line up older drops too.
Reading start date and duration
The two numbers you need are the start time and the duration. Add them to get the done date:
| Entry (from the dashboard) | Start | Duration | Done (about) |
|---|---|---|---|
| March 2026 spam update | Mar 24, 2026 | 19 hours, 30 minutes | Mar 25, 2026 |
| March 2026 core update | Mar 27, 2026 | 12 days, 4 hours | Apr 8, 2026 |
| May 2026 core update | May 21, 2026 | 11 days, 21 hours | Jun 2, 2026 |
| September 2026 spam update | Sep 24, 2026 | 13 days, 16 hours | Oct 8, 2026 |
A row with no duration is still rolling out. Do not judge your data until it has one, then wait a further week (why the wait).
Turn dashboard dates into before and after weeks
Google advises comparing a week at least a full week after the update completes with a week before it started (Google, core updates). From a dashboard row:
- Before week: the last full Monday to Sunday week that ends before the start date.
- After week: the first full Monday to Sunday week that starts 7 or more days after the done date.
- In Search Console, open Performance, Search results, then the date filter, Compare, Custom, and enter both weeks.
- Exclude brand queries with a "Doesn't match regex" filter, then sort the Pages tab by Clicks Difference.
Example for the March 2026 core update: before week March 16 to 22, after week April 20 to 26.
When two entries overlap
Updates sometimes land close together. In March 2024 the core and spam updates started the same day. In March 2026 a short spam update (March 24) came three days before the core update (March 27).
| Your drop started | Most likely cause |
|---|---|
| Inside a spam update only | Spam update. Check the spam policies |
| Inside a core rollout only | Core update. Run the checklist |
| Inside both | Check spam policies first: those problems have a clearer fix |
| Inside a Crawling, Indexing or Serving incident | Likely temporary. Wait for the incident to close, then recheck |
| On no dashboard date at all | Probably your site: a release, a redirect, a noindex, a lost link, or demand |
Incidents vs updates
A crawling, indexing or serving incident is a fault on Google's side. Once it is fixed, sites usually return to normal on their own, and you do not need to change your pages. A ranking update is a deliberate change. If an update moved you, the old rankings will not come back by waiting. Treat the two very differently.
Get notified
The dashboard has an RSS feed (linked at the bottom of the page) and publishes its incident history as JSON. Add the feed to a reader, or to a Slack channel through an RSS app, so you know the day an update starts. Then you can write it in your log before anyone asks why traffic moved.
How to use this with an AI assistant
Connect SEOmatic at https://seomatic.ai/mcp and ask: "Use gsc_performance with action trend on mysite.com for the last 90 days. Compare the clicks and impressions of the 7 days after the last Google update finished with the 7 days before it started, and tell me if the change is bigger than normal week-to-week movement." Reading Search Console data needs a free sign-in with connect_seomatic.
More from the core update checklist
- The checklistGoogle Core Update: How to Tell If You Were Hit, and What to Do
- GuideGoogle Core Updates in 2026: Dates, What Changed and What to Do
- GuideGoogle Algorithm Updates: Which One Hit You, and What to Do
- GuideHow Long Does a Google Core Update Take to Roll Out?
- GuideHow Long Does It Take to Recover From a Google Core Update?
- GuideGoogle's Helpful Content Questions, as a Checklist You Can Score