You can’t compare Black Friday 2026 with Black Friday 2024 in Google Search Console because Search Console stopped showing Black Friday 2024 at the end of March 2026. It shows sixteen months of data. Black Friday 2024 was on November 29, 2024, and sixteen months later it moved out of the window. Black Friday 2025 is still there, but only until the end of March 2027, and three of its four figures can’t be compared with this year’s.
That’s the whole answer. The rest of this post is what it means for the comparison you were planning to make, and what you can still do before the next one goes.
The window moves every day
Search Console doesn’t hold a fixed year of data. It holds the last sixteen months, and the oldest day falls off as each new one arrives. Nothing announces it. A report run in February showed Black Friday 2024. The same report run in April didn’t.
Google’s API reaches slightly further back than the Search Console screen. When we measured it on August 29, 2026, the API returned data from April 17, 2025, twelve days earlier than the screen shows. Twelve days doesn’t rescue a holiday from two years ago.
Here is where each of the last three Black Fridays stands:
| Black Friday | Date | In Search Console until |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | November 29, 2024 | The end of March 2026. Already gone |
| 2025 | November 28, 2025 | The end of March 2027 |
| 2026 | November 27, 2026 | The end of March 2028 |
So this year you have one prior Black Friday to compare against, and next spring you’ll have the same problem with it.
The year you still have isn’t comparable on every figure
Even the comparison Search Console still lets you make, this Black Friday against last, has a problem most reports won’t mention.
Black Friday 2025 sits inside a period Google has confirmed it reported wrongly. From May 13, 2025 to April 27, 2026, a logging error stopped Search Console counting impressions accurately. Google’s own note says that impressions, click-through rate and average position were affected, and clicks were not. Google fixed the error going forward. It did not correct the history, so last Black Friday’s impressions are the figures Google holds, and they can’t be set beside this year’s.
There is a second break between Black Friday 2024 and 2025. On September 12, 2025, Google stopped serving a hundred search results to a page. Rank-tracking tools had been requesting a hundred results at a time, and every listing on those pages counted as an impression for the site in it. When that stopped, those impressions disappeared. Most sites saw impressions fall sharply while clicks held, and average position appear to improve, because the positions that vanished were the deep ones nobody scrolls to. Nothing about the sites changed.
Put the two together and the comparisons look like this:
| Comparing Black Friday 2026 with… | Clicks | Impressions, CTR, average position |
|---|---|---|
| Black Friday 2025 | Comparable | Not comparable: 2025 is inside Google’s logging error |
| Black Friday 2024 | Comparable, if you saved it | Not comparable: Google’s 100-results change falls between them |
Clicks are the figure that came through both breaks intact. If a report shows impressions well down on last Black Friday, treat it as a statement about Google’s counting before you treat it as a statement about your categories.
What to compare this year
Compare clicks, and compare the same days of the event, not the same dates. Black Friday moves a day earlier each year in this run, so a date-for-date comparison sets this Friday against last Thursday. Use a custom date range for each year: Friday to Cyber Monday 2026 against Friday to Cyber Monday 2025.
Read the categories that matter, not the site total. A site total that holds flat on Black Friday can hide a category that lost a third of its clicks and another that gained them. Search Console reports by page and by search term, not by category, so you’ll be grouping the pages yourself. Write the grouping down. You’ll want the same one next year.
Save last year before it goes
Black Friday 2025 stays in Search Console until the end of March 2027. If you want it in November 2027, you have to keep a copy yourself before then.
That’s harder than it sounds on a large catalog. Search Console’s export button saves 1,000 rows from a table, and a catalog of 30,000 products has far more pages than that. Google’s API goes further, but we measured it returning the top 5,000 search terms per day for each search type, not the 50,000 its documentation states. A copy taken through the API is a copy of the top of the list, not every search.
Whatever you save, save it by day, not as a five-day total. Next year’s Black Friday falls on different dates, and a total can’t be realigned to them.
Where Arkivana fits
Arkivana connects Google Search Console data to a store’s catalog, shows which products are losing search traffic and estimates what that is worth, and keeps every day it reads beyond Google’s sixteen-month window. It starts with the sixteen months Google still has on the day a site connects. A store connected before the end of March 2027 keeps Black Friday 2025, and every Black Friday after it. A store connected after that point has already lost it. Nothing, ours included, can bring back a day Google has stopped serving.