How long do Google updates take?
Across the 4 core updates for which Google published both a start and a finish, the average rollout is 22.0 days and the median 15.1. Spam updates are quicker: 10.3 days on average across 6. Google announces when an update begins and when it ends but has never published the elapsed time, or any summary of it — every number on this page is calculated here from Google's own dates.
Core updates
| On record | 28 in total, 4 with both a start and a finish |
|---|---|
| Average rollout | 22.0 days |
| Median rollout | 15.1 days |
| Longest | March 2024 core update — 46.0 days |
| Shortest | May 2026 core update — 11.9 days |
| Gap between starts | 171 days on average (shortest 28, longest 1010) |
| Most recent | May 2026 core update — started 21 May 2026, 148 days ago |
Every core update with a recorded rollout, longest first
Core updates per year
Spam updates
| On record | 13 in total, 6 with both a start and a finish |
|---|---|
| Average rollout | 10.3 days |
| Median rollout | 8.2 days |
| Longest | August 2025 spam update — 26.6 days |
| Shortest | March 2026 spam update — 0.8 days |
| Gap between starts | 464 days on average (shortest 37, longest 3417) |
| Most recent | September 2026 spam update — started 24 Sep 2026, 22 days ago |
Every spam update with a recorded rollout, longest first
Spam updates per year
What the numbers are good for
Deciding when to measure
Rankings swing during a rollout and settle after it. The practical use of an average rollout time is knowing how long to leave things alone: a comparison made on day three of a core update is being made against data that will have moved again by the time the update completes. The longest core rollout on record, the March 2024 core update, took 46.0 days.
Setting expectations for recovery
Meaningful recovery from a core update generally arrives with a later core update rather than days after a fix. Core updates have started 171 days apart on average, with gaps as long as 1010 days — which is the honest answer to “how long until we know if it worked?”
The full update history · What to do when an update lands · Download the data (CSV)
How this is calculated
Rollout duration is the finish time minus the start time, for updates where Google published both. That is every update since the Search Status Dashboard began reporting them, plus the few earlier ones whose completion Google explicitly announced. Updates with no published finish are counted in the totals but left out of every duration figure rather than estimated.
Gaps are measured between the start dates of consecutive updates of the same type. Updates for which only the month is reliably established are excluded, because placing them on the 1st would invent a precision the record does not have.
The sample is small — Google has only confirmed a few dozen updates of each kind — so treat averages as a guide to scale, not a forecast. These figures are free to quote with a link to this page.
Recalculated automatically whenever Google confirms a new update · status last checked 4m ago