Internal timing data presented by Gary Illyes at the three-day Google Search Central Live Deep Dive in Europe shows site moves typically take 1–3 months to index — and worst cases run 6 months to over a year. The figures, summarized by attendee John Campbell of We Are Roast, represent what Campbell called the "highlight of the day" — and the first public sharing of pipeline-level numbers from Google Search staff.

How does Google break down the pipeline?

Each process on the slides carries three numbers: a fastest time, a typical time, and a slowest time. "Many of these processes are linked. E.g. a page can't be indexed until it has been crawled, so delays stack up," Campbell wrote, summarizing Illyes's framing.

Illyes later cautioned that the figures were "an exercise to see if the audience can relate to the numbers we pulled internally and put in those slides." French SEO Neil McCarthy also posted additional context on LinkedIn.

Crawling: refresh crawls average 30 days

The crawling slide covered six steps:

• Discovery (new URL): ~20 hours typical; weeks to never slowest
• Refresh (known URL): ~30 days typical; weeks to never slowest
• Sitemap processing: ~24 hours typical; up to 14 days, or never for low-quality feeds
• robots.txt update: ~24 hours typical; 25 hours slowest
• Crawl capacity update: 4 hours to 1–2 weeks typical; 1–3 weeks slowest (in recovery)
• Crawl demand update: ~20 hours typical; weeks to months slowest

A separate note on the slide flagged that crawl capacity can drop in seconds when Google backs off because a server struggles.

Indexing: end-to-end averages 1.5 hours, slowest "months or never"

The indexing slide carries the widest spread between typical and slowest paths of any of the three sections:

• Rendering: seconds to render, hours in the queue typical; days to weeks slowest
• Meta annotations: 45–90 minutes typical; 1–4 days slowest
• Link annotations: minutes to 1–3 weeks typical; months slowest
• Indexing (end to end): ~1.5 hours typical; months or never slowest (quality)
• Removal: 1–3 weeks typical; months slowest
• Canonicalisation change: 1–3 weeks typical; months slowest (conflicting signals)
• Site move: 1–3 months typical; 6 months to 1 year+ slowest
• Structured data updates: hours to 1–2 weeks typical; weeks or never slowest (quality)
• Images: hours to days typical; weeks to months slowest
• Videos: hours to days typical; weeks to months slowest (deep analysis)

The slide also noted that a small site move can wrap in a few weeks — well under the broad 1–3 month typical window.

Serving: core updates need 3–6 months to recover

The serving slide covers what users and site owners actually see in search results:

• Removal in Search Console (owner): ~2 hours typical; 24 hours slowest
• Snippet update: 1–2 days typical; several weeks to months slowest
• Title update: 1–2 days typical; several weeks to months slowest
• Text result image update: 1–2 weeks typical; several weeks to months slowest
• Manual action removal: 1–2 weeks typical; 4–6 weeks, or much longer for dormant sites slowest
• Core update change: 3–6 months to recover typical; 6 months to 1 year slowest (next core update)
• Spam update change: 1–2 weeks continuous typical; months slowest (batch refreshes)

Two additional framing notes sat on the slide: core updates take 2–4 weeks to roll out, while spam updates roll out in 1–2 days.

What should SEOs monitor next?

The figures come from a single internal Google analysis and represent the company's first public sharing of pipeline-level timing. Watch whether Search Central publishes the slides, and whether the "typical" and "slowest" labels map to fixed percentiles across Google's index or remain ad hoc engineering observations. Site owners planning migrations should plan against the 1–3 month typical site-move window on the indexing slide, not the 1.5-hour end-to-end average, when setting stakeholder expectations.