Search Console deletes your history at 16 months. Keep it.

Connect once and Papercrane's agent pulls every month Google still serves, then keeps each new day in a store you own. Ask which pages are decaying and which queries are rising, joined with GA4 and Google Ads, answered on a live dashboard.

See what expires tonight

Connect in about a minute with read access you approve on Google's consent screen. Free to connect and ask. Paid plans start when you publish a dashboard. See pricing

Your data has a back edge, and it moved last night

Google keeps the last 16 months of your search performance and no more, so every night the oldest day quietly drops off. Nothing brings a deleted day back; the only thing you control is which day the keeping starts.

Today is August 28, 2026. Everything before April 28, 2025 is no longer in your Performance report, and tonight another day joins it.

The dates above are computed when the page loads. Tomorrow the edge moves again.

What the agent actually sets up

This is not a screenshot habit or a spreadsheet you must remember to update. It is a small data pipeline the agent builds and watches for you.

1. Connect

with read access you approve on Google's consent screen.

2. Backfill

the agent pulls the full window Google still serves for your property, row by row: up to 50,000 rows a day per search type, not the 1,000 row export the download button gives you.

3. Keep

a scheduled pull appends each new day to a store that is yours: plain data you can export any time, under a dashboard that is code you own.

4. Watch

dashboards stay live, and when something breaks the error routes back to the agent instead of waiting for you to notice.

Your property stays the source of truth for the live window. The store only grows; nothing is written back to Google.

Ask what a 16 month window can't answer

Which pages are decaying: losing clicks this quarter versus the same quarter two years ago?

Which rising queries have no page of ours targeting them yet?

Are we buying Google Ads clicks on queries we already rank first for?

joins Google Ads

Which pages' search clicks become GA4 signups, not just sessions?

joins GA4

Which queries sit at position 11 to 20 with impressions worth a push?

The first question cannot be asked in Search Console at all once the comparison month passes the 16 month edge. Every answer comes back as a chart on a live hosted dashboard, not an export you'll redo next month.

Four ways to keep Search Console data

	Day one history	What it takes	What it costs	When it breaks
BigQuery bulk export	None: starts empty the day you set it up	A Google Cloud project, SQL, and a BI tool on top	Cloud storage and query costs, plus your hours	You are the on call engineer
A GSC tool subscription	Starts capturing at signup	Another login, another per site tier	$39 to $125+ per month	Support ticket
A Looker Studio template	None kept: it reads the same expiring window live	Connector setup per property	Free	Silently shows less history every month
Papercrane	The full window Google still serves, backfilled	One connection and one question	Free to connect and ask; paid when you publish	Errors route back to the agent for repair

The Looker Studio row surprises people: a dashboard reading Google's window live loses its left edge on the same schedule Google does.

When you don't need us

If you want your competitors' keywords, difficulty scores, or backlinks, that is Ahrefs' and Semrush's home turf; Search Console data, ours included, only ever describes your own site. If your team already runs Google's BigQuery bulk export with an analyst who lives in SQL, that pipeline is excellent and costs almost nothing, so keep it. Papercrane earns its place when nobody on the team wants to be the pipeline: when you want the history kept, joined with GA4 and Google Ads, and answered on a dashboard someone else maintains.