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Google Search Console reporting bug drops some image search data

Beware of another reporting glitch in Google Search Console.

Barry Schwartz on December 4, 2018 at 10:20 am

Google has lost data in the Google Search Console’s search analytics and performance reports starting on Dec. 1 . Specifically, Google said image search data was lost because of a bug. It is not clear how much data was lost and over what period of time but we do know that when you filter your search analytics and performance reports by image search, on Dec. 1, it may be missing some reporting data.

What Google confirms. Google posted on the data anomalies page, “December 1 onward: Some data for clicks in Google Images from mobile devices was dropped. This change only affects Search Console reporting, not your actual performance on Google Search.”

John Mueller from Google confirmed that this was a bug and not an intentional change to how Google reports on image search.

No, just an unfortunate bug. :-/
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) December 4, 2018

Why it matters. When you are looking at your search analytics and performance reports in Google Search Console and you see a dip in traffic and impressions, it might be related to this bug. If you further filter on image search, you should be able to see the extent of the data issue.

Google did add, “This change only affects Search Console reporting, not your actual performance on Google Search.”

Postscript: This goes through December 3rd, Google updated their document to say December 3rd.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.