The Google Search Console links report is pulling live data again after a failure that stretched across several weeks. The fix is substantive: the count reported now reflects the current state of external links, not the stale snapshot that Google temporarily substituted during the outage.
The original breakdown began in mid-March. Sites monitoring the report saw external link counts collapse to zero or drop sharply without any ranking-correlated explanation. Google’s initial response was a rollback to an older data state, not a true repair. That stopgap left the report frozen at historical figures while the actual link graph continued to change.
Search Engine Roundtable, which has tracked this report’s reliability issues over multiple incidents, confirmed on June 12 that the data is now updating normally. The discrepancy between the pre-fix and post-fix counts is meaningful: one monitored property moved from roughly 135,000 reported external links to approximately 165,000, a gap consistent with weeks of untracked changes.
SEO teams that paused link audits or deferred outreach decisions during the outage should re-pull current data before drawing conclusions. Counts that looked flat or declining across March through early June may simply reflect the frozen report, not actual link loss.
Reported by Search Engine Roundtable (Barry Schwartz), published June 12, 2026.
