Twenty hours to find a page you have just published. Thirty days before it looks at that page again. Three to six months to recover from a core update. Those are Google’s own internal timings, shown in public for the first time this week. They turn a lot of guesswork into something you can plan around.
SEO and search
Google published how long its own machine takes
At Google’s Search Central Live Deep Dive in Barcelona on 2 October, Gary Illyes showed Google’s internal timings for crawling, indexing and serving. John Campbell of the agency ROAST wrote up the detail, which went wide on 5 October.
A brand new URL takes roughly 20 hours to be discovered, though some are never found at all. A URL Google already knows about gets refreshed roughly every 30 days. Sitemap processing takes about 24 hours, sometimes 14 days. Indexing end to end takes about an hour and a half when every step succeeds.
On the serving side, title and snippet changes appear in 1 to 2 days and structured data updates in hours to a week or two. Recovery from a core update runs 3 to 6 months. One caveat. This came from an attendee, not from official documentation, and Google gave no methodology. Illyes stressed that these processes feed each other, so a delay in one pushes out everything after it.
Why this matters for your business: You now have a defensible answer when someone asks why a new page is not ranking after four days. If you change prices, titles or stock levels, the 30 day refresh is your real constraint, not how fast you publish. Submit changed URLs through Search Console instead of waiting for the crawl, keep your sitemap lastmod dates honest, and stop promising a core update recovery inside one quarter.
Google throws out forty billion spam pages a day
From the same event. Google said it filters 40 billion spam pages every day, and that the reason for so many spam updates through 2026 is simply that there is far more new content to sort through. The line that matters most. The team is now using AI to catch more of it.
Google also described where its attention has moved. Content made at scale with little effort now ranks above link spam as a priority, quality is assessed page by page rather than site by site, and user feedback feeds new filters. The problem was put plainly. AI slop is increasing, which means more poor quality content.
Why this matters for your business: Judging quality page by page is the part to act on. One thin page drafted by AI no longer drags your whole domain down, but neither will the good pages around it carry it. Find the pages on your site that exist only to catch a keyword. Give each one something real, a price, a photograph, a local detail, a named author, or take it down.
Social media
TikTok will qualify your leads inside the chat
TikTok used Advertising Week to announce a run of advertiser tools, and one changes how lead generation works there. Agentic Leads is an AI agent that generates and qualifies leads through direct messages and website forms, so the first conversation with a prospect happens before anyone at your end picks up the phone.
Alongside it, a Shopping Assistant answers questions on sizing, shipping and availability while someone is still browsing, and Buy Direct allows a purchase in one click from the For You feed. GMV Max now factors affiliate commissions and coupons into its optimisation, so it works toward margin rather than headline revenue.
Buy Direct and Agentic Leads are not available in Europe yet and TikTok has said nothing about South Africa.
Why this matters for your business: An AI agent answering your enquiries is only as good as what it is allowed to say. Write down the five questions buyers actually ask, and the answers you will put in writing, including price ranges and lead times. Brands with that documented will switch this on in an afternoon. Everyone else will argue about it for a month.
Content and advertising
Google Ads will translate an entire campaign, into ten languages that are not ours
Google published the support documentation for its AI campaign localisation tool for Search campaigns, now in beta. You select a campaign and it builds a new one in another language, translating headlines, descriptions, sitelinks, callouts and keywords. It strips text overlays off your images and will translate your landing pages through a JavaScript snippet.
Two things to watch. Budgets and bids copy across exactly as they are, with no currency conversion. And the ten supported languages are Dutch, French, Canadian French, German, Italian, Polish, Brazilian and European Portuguese, and Castilian and Latin American Spanish. There is no Afrikaans, no isiZulu, no Sesotho.
Why this matters for your business: If you sell into Europe this removes a week of manual work, but set the budget by hand afterwards or you will spend a rand figure in euros. The review table shows the original, the translation and that translation turned back into English, so use it rather than trusting the output. Locally, take the opposite lesson. The automated route does not reach South African languages, so writing your Afrikaans or isiZulu ad copy by hand stays a real advantage.
Automotive
What a thirty day refresh does to your stock pages
This is a read-across rather than automotive news, because nothing new broke in dealer marketing over the last two days. The Barcelona timings apply directly to a dealership website, and the 30 day refresh figure is the one that hurts.
Your vehicle detail pages change constantly. A car sells, a price drops, a derivative runs out. If Google looks at a known URL roughly once a month, the price showing for a car you sold three weeks ago can still be the old one. A shopper clicks, finds a vehicle that is gone, and leaves. That costs you twice, in the wasted click and in the signal it sends back.
Why this matters for your dealership: Treat sold stock as a technical job rather than an admin one. When a car sells, return the correct status code instead of leaving a stale page up, and push the URL through Search Console the same day. Make sure your sitemap lastmod date moves only when a price or status genuinely changes, so the right pages earn an early visit. Then show on every vehicle page the date it was last updated.
What to do this week
- Submit changed URLs through Search Console rather than waiting on the monthly refresh.
- Check that your sitemap lastmod dates move only when a page genuinely changes.
- Audit three thin pages and either improve them or remove them.
- Write down the five questions buyers ask, and the answers you will put in writing.
- If you sell vehicles, fix how your site handles sold stock URLs this month.
If you want a second pair of eyes on any of this, we will look at your site and tell you plainly what we would change. Get in touch with Maple Leaf Agency.
Sources
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google Search Data On Crawling, Indexing & Serving Timelines
- PPC Land, Google says new pages take about 20 hours to be found
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google Search Spam Updates Use AI To Find AI Spam
- ChannelX, TikTok AI-Powered Updates For Advertisers Unveiled
- Google Ads Help, About the AI campaign localisation tool for Search campaigns
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google Ads AI Campaign Localization Tool
- Data Studios, OpenAI launches new visual ad format in ChatGPT