Your traffic drops overnight, or new pages stop showing up in Google. The first question is always the same: is it my site, or is it Google? Until now, the answer was hard to find. On 14 December 2022, Google launched the Google Search Status Dashboard, a public page that shows when Google’s own crawling, indexing or serving systems have a widespread problem.
In this article I explain what the dashboard shows, what it does not show yet, and how I plan to use it together with Search Console and the Google Search Central Twitter account. The short version: it is a quick first check, not a full diagnosis tool.
What Google Launched on 14 December 2022
Google announced the dashboard in a post on the Search Central blog called Introducing the Google Search Status Dashboard. The dashboard itself lives at status.search.google.com.
It works in a similar way to the status pages Google already runs for products like Google Cloud and Workspace. You see the current state of a few core systems, a short history, and details for any incident.
Before this, Google shared Search outages mainly through the Google Search Central Twitter account (@googlesearchc). That worked if you happened to be on Twitter at the right moment. A dedicated page with a history is much easier to check and to share with a boss or client.
The Three Systems It Covers
At launch, the dashboard reports on three parts of Google Search:
- Crawling: Googlebot (Google’s crawler) finding and fetching pages from websites.
- Indexing: Google processing those pages and storing them so they can appear in results.
- Serving: Google showing results to people when they search.
These are the three stages every page goes through before it can get a click. If any one of them breaks on Google’s side, many sites feel it at the same time.
What Counts as a “Widespread” Issue
Google says the dashboard covers widespread issues. It describes these as systemic problems with a Search system that affect a large number of sites or Search users. Google also said these kinds of disruptions are rare.
That means a problem with only your site will not appear here. If your server is down, your robots.txt blocks Googlebot, or a plugin added a noindex tag (a line of code that tells Google not to index a page), the dashboard will stay green. Those are your problems to find and fix.
How the Google Search Status Dashboard Works
The main view shows widespread issues from the last seven days. Crawling, indexing and serving are listed separately, so you can see at a glance which part of Search had trouble and on which day.
When there is an incident, you can click it to read the details. Google posts updates as it learns more. Those updates can include the scope of the problem and possible mitigations (steps that reduce the impact while a fix is in progress).
How Fast Google Says It Will Post
Google gave two timing goals in the launch post:
- It aims to post an incident within an hour of confirming an ongoing, widespread issue with its Site Reliability Engineers (the engineers who keep Google’s systems running).
- It aims to post follow-up updates within 12 hours of each other while the incident is ongoing.
Note the word “confirming”. The incident start time is generally when Google confirmed the problem, not when it first began. In practice, I expect SEOs to spot odd behaviour in their own data before the dashboard turns red. That is fine. The value is in getting official confirmation.
When an Incident Counts as Resolved
Google says an incident is resolved when its engineers have made changes that end the impact on the system. But Google also warns that sites may still see effects for a while, because affected pages need to be processed again.
This matters for reporting. If an indexing problem is marked resolved on Tuesday, do not expect every missing page to be back on Tuesday. I would give it several days before I treat any remaining gap as a site problem.
RSS Feed and History
The dashboard has an RSS feed you can subscribe to, and it keeps a view of past incidents. Both are useful:
- RSS feed: add it to your feed reader, or connect it to a team chat tool that can read RSS. Then you hear about incidents without checking the page every day.
- History: when you look back at a strange week in your data, you can check whether Google had a confirmed problem on those dates.
I think the history view will be the part I use most. Explaining a past dip with an official Google record is much easier than explaining it with a guess.
What the Dashboard Does Not Show Yet
This is the part I want to be clear about, because the name can be misleading. At launch, the dashboard is about system health. It is not a list of everything Google changes in Search.
No Ranking Updates Section
The dashboard does not list ranking updates. Core updates, spam updates, helpful content updates and reviews updates are not shown on it right now.
This month is a good example. Google started a helpful content update on 5 December 2022 and a December 2022 link spam update on 14 December 2022, the same day the dashboard launched. Neither appears on the dashboard. You learn about those updates the same way as before: from Google’s announcements on Twitter and the Search Central blog.
So if your rankings move and the dashboard shows nothing, that does not mean “Google did nothing”. It only means Google did not have a confirmed widespread outage in crawling, indexing or serving.
No Site-Specific Problems
As covered above, the dashboard ignores anything that only affects your site or a small group of sites. It will not tell you about:
- Manual actions (penalties applied by a person at Google).
- Security issues like hacked pages.
- Your own server errors, DNS problems or slow responses.
- Pages dropped from the index because of thin or duplicate content.
For all of these, Search Console is still the place to look.
No Data About Your Traffic
The dashboard does not show clicks, impressions or rankings. It does not tell you how much an incident hurt you. You have to line up its dates with your own data to work that out.
How to Use It Alongside Search Console
I see the dashboard and Search Console as two halves of the same check. The dashboard answers “Is Google broken?” Search Console answers “Is my site broken, and how much did this hurt?”
Here is the order I plan to follow when traffic or indexing looks wrong:
- Confirm the drop is real. Check the Performance report in Search Console and your analytics tool. Make sure it is not a tracking problem, a holiday, or a normal weekly pattern.
- Check the Google Search Status Dashboard. Look for any incident in crawling, indexing or serving on the dates of the drop. Open the incident and read the latest update.
- Check for a ranking update. Look at the Search Central Twitter account and blog for an announced update around the same dates. Remember the dashboard does not show these.
- Check your own site in Search Console. Open the Page indexing report, the Crawl Stats report (under Settings) and the Manual actions and Security issues reports.
- Test key URLs. Use the URL Inspection tool on a few important pages to see how Google last crawled and indexed them. If you check many URLs, the URL Inspection API can save time.
- Write down what you found. Note the dates, the incident (if any) and the steps you took. This makes the next investigation faster.
Which Search Console Reports Match Each System
It helps to know which report to open for each part of the dashboard. This is how I map them:
| Dashboard system | Search Console report to check | What to look for |
|---|---|---|
| Crawling | Crawl Stats (Settings) | A sudden fall in crawl requests, or host status warnings for robots.txt, DNS or server connectivity |
| Indexing | Page indexing and URL Inspection | New pages stuck as “Discovered” or “Crawled – currently not indexed”, or a drop in indexed pages |
| Serving | Performance | A sharp drop in impressions across many queries and pages on the same dates |
If the dashboard shows an incident and your report shows a matching dip on the same dates, the cause is very likely on Google’s side. If the dashboard is clear and only your site shows the problem, start looking at your own setup.
A Practical Example
Say you publish ten new articles on Monday, and by Thursday none of them are indexed. Normally a few would be.
First, you open the dashboard. If it shows an indexing incident for those days, you can relax a little. Wait for Google to mark it resolved, then give it a few more days. Use URL Inspection on one or two of the new URLs after that.
If the dashboard is clear, the problem is more likely on your side. Inspect one of the new URLs. Check for a noindex tag, a wrong canonical, a robots.txt block or missing internal links. In my experience, a new page with no internal links pointing to it is one of the most common reasons it sits unindexed.
Where Twitter Fits In
The dashboard does not replace the Google Search Central Twitter account. For now, I would keep watching both.
- Google Search Central (
@googlesearchc): shared outages before the dashboard existed, and still shares news and documentation changes. Google also asked people to send feedback on the dashboard by tweeting this account. - Google SearchLiaison (
@searchliaison): Google’s public liaison for Search, which often posts when a ranking update starts and when it finishes. - Search Central blog: bigger updates and new features get a full post here, with the most detail.
Put simply: the dashboard for system problems, Twitter and the blog for ranking updates and news. When I review a past drop, I check all three for the same dates. For the bigger picture of what a core update looks like, see my notes on the September 2022 core update.
Why This Launch Matters for Site Owners
This is a small launch, but I think it is a useful one. Here is why.
It Saves Time in a Panic
When traffic falls, people often start changing things straight away. They edit titles, change templates or disavow links. If the real cause was a Google outage, those changes waste time and can create new problems. A quick look at the dashboard first can stop that.
It Gives You Something Official to Point To
If you report to a manager or a client, “Google had an indexing problem that week” is easier to accept when you can link to a dated Google incident. It turns an opinion into a fact.
It Makes Reporting Cleaner
When you build monthly or yearly reports, you can mark the dates of confirmed Google incidents. That way nobody mistakes a Google-side dip for the result of an SEO change.
Limits I Would Keep in Mind
I like the dashboard, but I would not rely on it alone. A few honest limits:
- It is not first to know. Google posts after it confirms a problem. Your own data, or other SEOs talking about it, may show the problem earlier.
- “Widespread” is Google’s call. A problem that hits a certain type of site or a certain country may never reach the dashboard if Google does not see it as widespread.
- It is brand new. We do not yet know how often incidents will appear or how detailed the updates will be. I would judge it after a few months of real incidents.
- Recovery takes longer than the fix. Resolved does not mean your data is back to normal the same day.
How I Would Set It Up Today
This takes a few minutes and is worth doing now, before you need it:
- Bookmark
status.search.google.comnext to your Search Console bookmark. - Add the dashboard’s RSS feed to your feed reader or team chat.
- Follow the Google Search Central and SearchLiaison Twitter accounts if you do not already.
- Add a “check the status dashboard” step to whatever checklist you use for traffic drops.
- Keep a simple log of confirmed incidents and ranking updates next to your traffic data.
Conclusion
The Google Search Status Dashboard gives you an official place to check whether Google’s crawling, indexing or serving systems have a widespread problem. It shows the last seven days, keeps a history, and offers an RSS feed. It does not show ranking updates or anything specific to your site, so it works best as the first step in a longer check, with Search Console and Google’s Twitter accounts covering the rest.
Your next step: bookmark the dashboard, subscribe to the feed, and make it the first stop on your traffic-drop checklist. If you saw a drop this month, also read up on the December 2022 link spam update, because the dashboard will not tell you about it.
