What is the Bulk Data Export in Google Search Console?

Bulk Data Export is a one-time setup in Search Console that streams your raw daily performance data into a Google BigQuery dataset. It is the only official way to get uncapped, row-level Search Console data that keeps accumulating past the 16-month window.

How it differs from the other export routes

• The UI Export button caps at 1,000 rows per download.
• The Search Analytics API returns at most 25,000 rows per request and only reaches back 16 months.
• Bulk Data Export writes every row Google has for that day into your own dataset, which you keep for as long as you pay to store it.

Setting it up

1. Create or pick a Google Cloud project with billing enabled and enable the BigQuery API.
2. In IAM, grant search-console-data-export@system.gserviceaccount.com the BigQuery Job User and BigQuery Data Editor roles.
3. In Search Console, open Settings > Bulk data export, enter the Cloud project ID, choose a dataset location, and continue.

The first export usually lands within a couple of days. You must be a property owner to configure it.

What lands in BigQuery

Three tables are created and appended daily:

• searchdata_site_impression - data aggregated by property.
• searchdata_url_impression - data aggregated by URL, with columns for search appearance types.
• ExportLog - a record of which days were written successfully.

Rows whose query was too rare to show are still exported, with the query field empty and an anonymised flag set, so your impression totals reconcile even though the query text does not.

The limits worth knowing

• It is not retroactive. History starts on the day you configure it, so set it up before you need the data.
• You pay Google Cloud for storage and for every query you run against the dataset.
• Setting the location or dataset wrongly means deleting and reconfiguring the export.

Tip: if the export stops, check the ExportLog table first. A missing day there almost always means the service account lost its BigQuery roles, not that Search Console dropped the data.

How AutoPSEO helps

AutoPSEO stores the same rows for you without a Cloud project or a BigQuery bill. Turning on stored history for a property imports up to 16 months at once and then keeps building toward a 10-year unsampled archive, queryable from the normal reports. See exporting data and the Search Console API.