Google deletes your Search Console data at 16 months
Search Console keeps sixteen months of data. On the day a row passes that age it is gone — not archived, not available on request, not recoverable by paying for something.
Most people discover this at exactly the moment it matters: when they want to know whether this January beat the January two years ago, or whether a decline started before or after a redesign.
Why sixteen months is a cruel number
It is just long enough to feel comfortable and just short enough to break the comparison you most want to make.
Year-on-year comparison needs two years to be a trend rather than a coincidence. Sixteen months gives you a clean year-on-year read for the most recent four months and nothing for the other eight. Seasonal businesses — which is most businesses — get one good look at their peak season and then lose the previous one.
Migrations are worse. The honest question after a replatform is "are we back to where we were?", and where we were is frequently more than sixteen months ago by the time the dust settles.
What the API will and will not give you
The Search Analytics API serves the same sixteen months the interface does. There is no historical endpoint and no paid tier with longer retention. Analytics does not contain this data either — GA4 knows about sessions from organic search, not which queries produced them.
Worth knowing: the API aggregates over whatever window you request. Ask for sixteen months in one call and you get one row per query, summed. That is a summary, not history, and it cannot be broken back into days afterwards. If you want history you have to ask day by day and store the days.
What actually works
Store it yourself, daily, from now on.
Day-level granularity. Anything coarser cannot be re-sliced later, and you will want to re-slice it.
Idempotent writes. Google revises the last few days after the fact, so a good archiver re-fetches a short trailing window every night and updates rather than inserts. Get this wrong and your archive silently doubles its own numbers.
Queries and pages both. They answer different questions and neither can be derived from the other.
The uncomfortable part
There is no way to recover what has already aged out. If you start today, your archive begins today, and the sixteen months Google currently holds is the most history you will ever have for the period before it.
The cost of starting is small. The cost of having started two years ago is zero. The cost of not starting is a permanent hole you notice at the worst possible moment.