Google just published how long its own processes take — set one date before you edit again

Google's September 2026 spam update is still rolling out. It went live on 24 September, the first wave of site impact arrived across 25–27 September, and a second wave hit on 30 September and into 1 October. 1 Google's note on the Search status dashboard says the rollout may take up to two weeks, and the dashboard still lists the update as the newest ranking incident. 2

The forums spent the week doing what they always do in the middle of an update: waiting, and reading whatever moved. On the WebmasterWorld observations thread, Micha wrote that the pattern "has been like this for me every single time so far," and put the moment to judge a drop at the end of the rollout. 3 By 4 October he and morpheus83 were reporting Discover and news traffic climbing back. 3

Then, on 2 October, Gary Illyes of Google put a set of numbers on screen at Search Central Live Deep Dive in Barcelona. They are Google's own internal figures for how long its crawling, indexing and serving processes take — from discovering a new URL to settling a site move. John Campbell of ROAST, a community speaker at the event, wrote the figures down, and Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Roundtable have both carried them since. 456

Those figures close a gap that forum threads leave open. Google has described these stages in words for years and has put a duration on very few of them, so a developer watching a dip this week has been measuring the wait against guesswork. The tip for this issue is to take the figures as a calendar.

A drop that follows an update brings the urge to act — rewrite the thin pages, resubmit the sitemap, move the URLs, edit the titles. Google's figures are the first hard brake on that urge. Several of the moves a developer reaches for run for weeks in the typical case, and the stages that carry them are linked: a page cannot be indexed until Google has crawled it, so one slow stage pushes the rest of the chain behind it. 4

"Never" appears as the slowest time in five rows, and three of those rows tie it to quality — sitemap processing, end-to-end indexing, and structured data updates. 5 A page Google judges to be low value can stay out of the index however quickly the plumbing around it works.

The shape of the mistake is a rewrite that lands in the middle of a process already running. Google's site-move guide tells owners to change one thing at a time and to expect ranking fluctuation while Google recrawls. 7 Its core-updates guide tells owners to skip "quick fix" changes and to treat deleting content as a last resort. 8

Take the one change you made, or the one you are waiting on, and find it in this table. Write its typical figure as a date on your calendar. Hold every further site edit until that date arrives.

If the date arrives and the change has landed, you are done. If the date arrives ahead of the change, you now have a reason to look closer at the page, and the check has an order. Google's core-updates page says to confirm the update has finished rolling out, wait a full week after that, and only then compare the affected week with the week before. A small drop in position — from 2 to 4 — is a case for leaving content that already performs well alone; a large drop, from 4 to 29, is the case that earns a page-by-page look. 8

A site hit by the spam update waits longer than any row in the table suggests. Google's spam-updates page says a site that violates the spam policies may rank lower or drop out, and that changes may help once its systems "learn over a period of months" that the site complies. 9 A cleanup done this week sits at the start of that period, so the date you write is a checkpoint through the wait.

The rows apply to any site that changed something in the last few weeks: a title or snippet edit, a canonical fix, a sitemap resubmission, a URL move. They apply with more force to a site partway through a move, and to one waiting on a reconsideration after a manual action. On the Search Console side, the Page Indexing report gives a broad count of what Google has indexed, and the Sitemaps report shows how many of the URLs you submitted have been picked up — enough to watch the machinery move while the rankings settle. 1011

Three cautions belong with the numbers. Google gave them in a conference talk and left the slides unpublished, so the source is an attendee's recap, and Illyes framed the exercise as a test of whether the audience could relate to figures pulled internally. 4 The recap leaves out the fastest time for each process, and what counts as "typical" is undefined, with no sample size or measurement period behind it. 5 The processes also stack, so one figure describes a single stage while a real site waits through several at once. 4

Read each figure as a reference point. The date you write from it marks the moment a wait becomes worth investigating — a checkpoint for you, on Google's clock.