Google Search Console’s links report has not pulled in new backlink data since roughly August 8, a stretch of about a month with no refresh. Barry Schwartz reported the gap at Search Engine Roundtable on September 8, after tracking the report’s update cadence himself. Anyone pulling a link profile from Search Console this week is looking at a picture that is already a month stale.
That matters because the links report is the primary free window into what Google has actually crawled and counted as inbound links to a site. Teams use it to spot new toxic link clusters, confirm a disavow file took effect, or sanity-check a manual-action appeal. When the underlying data stops moving, all three of those workflows run on outdated evidence without any warning that the evidence is old.
Google does not timestamp the links report, so there is no built-in way to know the data is stale short of watching it day to day, which is what Schwartz has been doing. He began tracking the update frequency after noticing similar delays elsewhere in Search Console, including the page indexing report, the crawl stats report, and the performance report. That history matters: this is not an isolated glitch in one report, it is a pattern across the tool’s core diagnostic surfaces.
Schwartz’s own past tracking found the links report has typically refreshed every couple of weeks. A month without a single update is roughly double that normal cadence, based on his monitoring rather than any figure Google has published. Google has not commented on the delay or given a reason for it, and the source report includes no independent measurement of how many sites are affected or how much link data has been missed in the gap.
The unexplained timestamp gap is itself a signal. Search Console increasingly functions as SEO practitioners’ primary free source of Google-reported site data, alongside indexing and performance reports that have shown their own delays this year. A links report that goes quiet for a month, with no flag telling the user it is stale, pushes practitioners toward third-party crawlers like Ahrefs or Semrush for anything time-sensitive, even though those tools measure a different, broader index than Google’s own crawl.
For link auditing specifically, the practical risk is a false negative: a toxic link added in the past month will not show up yet, and a disavowed link’s removal will not confirm as processed either. Teams running an active disavow campaign or responding to a manual action tied to unnatural links should not treat an empty or unchanged Search Console links report as proof that nothing has changed. Cross-check any time-sensitive link decision against a third-party index until Google’s report starts moving again, and do not schedule disavow submissions around what the report shows this month.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the delay on September 8, 2026.
