Google says recovering from a core update can take up to a year

The timing table Illyes put on the wall

At Google's Search Central Live conference in Barcelona on 2 October 2026, Google Search Relations analyst Gary Illyes presented typical and slowest timing ranges for the main stages of the Search pipeline.^[1] Google has not posted the presentation slides publicly, so the figures below come from session recaps published by ROAST's John Campbell and Search Engine Journal's Matt G. Southern.^[2]

The table covers crawling, indexing and serving in one place. Discovery of new URLs typically takes about 20 hours, with slowest cases running from weeks to never discovered.^[3] Known URLs get a refresh roughly every 30 days. Sitemap processing completes in about 24 hours under normal load, stretching to 14 days or never in the slowest cases.

Indexing moves faster for pages Google considers worth keeping. End-to-end indexing completes in approximately 1.5 hours in typical cases, with slowest cases taking months or never completing for low-quality pages.^[1] A canonical change takes one to three weeks, stretching to months when conflicting signals muddy the picture.

Delays compound across stages

Illyes was direct about why the numbers matter in sequence. "Many of these processes are linked. E.g. a page can't be indexed until crawled," he said.^[1] Illyes also separated rollout speed from recovery speed, a distinction agencies often miss. "Core updates take 2-4 weeks to roll out. Spam updates roll out in 1-2 days," he said.^[1]

The stacking effect means a site that crawled slowly, returned ambiguous canonical signals, and then caught a penalty can accumulate delays at every stage before a single ranking outcome is visible. Each stage waits on the one before it, so the worst-case column in the table is a plausible chain for any site carrying quality or signal problems into a migration or an update window.

Christmas, migrations and spam recovery

A site move typically takes 1-3 months to settle, with slower migrations requiring 6 months to a year or more to fully take effect.^[1] At the absolute slowest end, Illyes's table implies a migration started 1 October 2026 might not settle until October 2027, past Christmas 2026 and most of the 2027 trading year.

The September 2026 spam update adds a second layer of pressure. Prompt the Market reported at the time that the rollout could run for two weeks.^[4] Illyes's table puts visible changes from a spam update at one to two weeks in typical cases, and shows that batch-refresh cases can stretch to months.^[1] An Australian retailer who took a spam hit in September and is banking on recovery before the Christmas peak has no guarantee from Illyes's data that the timeline delivers.

The practical read for agencies: clients ask when they will recover, and the honest answer is a range. A core update recovery at the slow end does not resolve until the next core update, which Illyes's data puts at six months to a year out.^[1]