Monday, June 1 is the enforcement date for Google Ads’ 37-month retention limit on granular performance data, and any advertiser or agency team that has not exported hourly, daily, or weekly reports beyond that window will permanently lose the records. This is not a soft deprecation. When the cutoff lands, the data disappears from the platform.
PPC Land reported the original policy announcement in early May. The deadline is now three days out.
The scope covers every major programmatic access point. The Google Ads API, Google Ads scripts, the Google Analytics Data API, and the BigQuery Data Transfer Service all fall under the new limit. Granular time-series data older than 37 months becomes inaccessible across all four. Monthly, quarterly, and annual aggregations are unaffected and retain an 11-year window. Reach and frequency data carries its own shorter limit: three years.
For SEM teams running year-over-year comparisons, the practical math is stark. Thirty-seven months reaches back to roughly April 2023. Any campaign performance data from before that date, at daily or more granular resolution, will be gone by Monday unless it has already been pulled and stored outside Google’s infrastructure.
The buried risk is the BigQuery backfill behavior, and it is severe enough to warrant a direct warning. If you have a BigQuery Data Transfer Service connector already syncing Google Ads data, you may believe your historical rows are safe because they were written to BigQuery before the policy took effect. They are not fully safe. If you trigger a manual backfill job after June 1 for any date range older than 37 months, the BigQuery connector will overwrite those existing table rows with empty values. The mechanism is standard transfer-service behavior: backfills write fresh query results into the destination table, and the fresh results for a date now outside the retention window will be blank. The advertiser ends up worse off than if they had never run the backfill.
The corrective action is to complete any needed historical exports before Monday, not after. For BigQuery users, do not initiate backfills covering pre-cutoff dates once the policy is live.
Practically, teams should prioritize in this order. First, identify any reporting or attribution workflows that consume daily or weekly Google Ads data at the campaign, ad group, keyword, or asset level for periods before April 2023. Second, pull those date ranges via the Google Ads API or a direct report download and write them to a warehouse or flat files under team control. Third, document which BigQuery transfer jobs are configured for historical date ranges and flag them to avoid triggering manual backfills after June 1.
Agency teams running multi-client accounts face the same cutoff across every managed account simultaneously. A data gap for one client’s 2022 search campaigns cannot be reconstructed after Monday. Google’s reporting interface will not restore it; neither will the API.
The 37-month window was not arbitrary. Google has cited infrastructure cost and data storage management as the rationale for the policy. Whether that explanation fully accounts for the impact on advertisers who built multi-year measurement frameworks around Google’s own tooling is a separate question. The announcement did not include any commitment to notify advertisers through the platform UI at the moment of deletion.
SEM and SEO teams that use historical Google Ads data to calibrate organic-versus-paid cannibalization analysis, model seasonal baselines, or support attribution audits for long-tail keywords should treat this week as a hard deadline: run the exports today, confirm the files are complete, and verify that no scheduled BigQuery backfill job will run against pre-cutoff dates after Sunday.
Reported by PPC Land on 2026-05-02.
