Google Crawl Timing Data: Why Spam Update Recovery Lags

Two announcements, one timeline problem

Google's September 2026 spam update finished rolling out on October 8, according to the company's Search Status Dashboard, after 13 days and 16 hours 3. The dashboard dates the rollout from September 24 to October 8, using US/Pacific timestamps 2.

The week before it ended, Google analyst Gary Illyes shared internal timing ranges for crawling, indexing and serving at Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe in Barcelona. He presented them on October 2, the event's closing day 1. Those figures reached the wider SEO community through an attendee recap by John Campbell of the agency ROAST rather than a formal Google publication 13.

The timing matters. Site owners hit by the spam update are now asking when they will see changes. Illyes' numbers suggest the answer depends on how quickly Google's systems actually revisit and reprocess a site, not on the date the rollout ended.

What the numbers say

The crawling figures set the baseline. A new URL is typically discovered in about 20 hours. A known URL is typically refreshed in about 30 days. Both rows list slowest cases ranging from weeks to never 1.

Other processes showed similar ranges:

• Sitemap processing: about 24 hours typically, but up to 14 days. It can also never happen when quality is the issue 1.
• robots.txt updates: the tightest range, at roughly a day typical and 25 hours slowest 1.
• Crawl capacity changes: anywhere from four hours to two weeks, stretching to one to three weeks for sites in recovery 1.
• Crawl demand changes: about 20 hours typically, but weeks to months at the slow end 1.

Further down the pipeline, the reported ranges get longer. Canonicalization changes run one to three weeks, site moves one to three months, and core update recovery three to six months 23.

Where the coverage diverges

All three outlets agree on the core figures. They differ in how much weight they put on them.

Search Engine Journal adds a caveat that deserves attention. The recap lists ranges as "typical" without defining what typical means 3. It is not clear whether that refers to a median, a common case, or a rough impression. Because the data is secondhand, nobody outside Google can check how the ranges were measured.

Scale Xpert frames the numbers around recovery. It argues that the end of a spam update does not mean Google has recrawled every changed URL, indexed every improvement or restored rankings 2. It also warns that the three-to-six-month core update recovery range should not become a deadline for spam update recovery 2. That warning matters, because the chart does not appear to include a dedicated row for spam update recovery at all.

Reading the chart honestly

The claim that spam update effects take months to fully register is an inference, not something Illyes stated directly. Still, it is a reasonable one based on his own numbers.

Recovery requires Google to notice what a site has changed. If a known URL is refreshed roughly every 30 days in the typical case, many fixes will not even be seen until well after the rollout ends. Once you add crawl demand shifts that can take months, and recrawls that sometimes never happen, a multi-month horizon becomes plausible for many sites.

That does not mean every penalized site recovers in three to six months. The core update figure measures something different, and borrowing it for spam recovery is the mistake Scale Xpert cautions against 2. A more defensible reading is that rollout end dates mark when Google finished deploying its systems, not when it finished re-evaluating your site.

For practitioners, the practical advice follows from the pipeline. Discovery is an early milestone, not proof of indexing 2. Site moves should be judged across all mapped URLs rather than by one homepage ranking 2. Conflicting canonical signals deserve checking before blaming the algorithm 2.

Other changes worth noting

The same news cycle brought smaller updates. Search Console's Performance report can now combine traffic from multiple countries 3. Google also commented on how it handles fake author profiles, and there was discussion of how AI crawlers detect sitemaps 3.

None of these change the main lesson of the week. Google has published rough timelines for its systems, and those timelines are slower and less certain than many site owners assume. The spam update ended on October 8. The effects on any given site may take much longer to work through, and in some cases may never be fully registered.