Google adds hourly data support to Search Analytics API

Google has expanded the functionality of its Search Analytics API to include hourly data, announced on Wednesday, April 9, 2025. This update arrives just three days ago, building upon improvements made to Search Console's performance reports in December 2024.

The latest update introduces hourly granularity to the API, extending beyond what's available in the Search Console interface. According to Google's announcement on their Search Central Blog, "we're adding hourly data to the API and with a wider scope than the product interface: while the product displays hourly data only for the past 24 hours, the API will return data for up to 10 days with an hourly breakdown."

This expanded timeframe provides significant benefits for developers and SEO professionals. The extended data access enables more sophisticated analysis, allowing users to "compare the most recent day to the same day in the previous week, which can be useful when analyzing patterns for the days of the week," according to Google.

Technical implementation details

To access the hourly data through the Search Analytics API, Google has introduced two specific changes to the API request body:

1. A new ApiDimension named "HOUR" for grouping responses by hour
2. A new dataState value named "HOURLY_ALL" that must be used when grouping by the HOUR dimension

The implementation requires specific parameters in the API request. A sample request shared in Google's documentation demonstrates the structure:

{
 "startDate": "2025-04-07",
 "endDate": "2025-04-07",
 "dataState": "HOURLY_ALL",
 "dimensions": [
   "HOUR"
 ]
}

When this request is processed, the API returns structured data containing metrics for each hour, including clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average position. The response provides timestamp-based keys that indicate the specific hour for each data set.

This update builds upon Google's December 2024 enhancement to Search Console, which introduced the '24 hours' view to performance reports. That update reduced the data delay by almost half, providing near real-time insights into website performance.

Moshe Samet, Search Console Product Manager, noted in the December announcement that the '24 hours' view includes "data from the last available 24 hours and will appear with a delay of only a few hours." The view was designed to help users identify how their pages and queries are performing in recent timeframes, monitor newly published content, and track search queries driving traffic within the last day.

Benefits for the marketing and SEO community

The expansion to 10 days of hourly data through the API represents a significant advancement for marketing professionals and SEO practitioners. This granular data access enables several key capabilities:

1. More responsive content strategy: Marketers can now monitor how newly published content performs hour by hour, allowing for faster optimization and strategy adjustments.
2. Better pattern recognition: The ability to compare hourly data across different days of the week helps identify temporal patterns in search behavior, enabling more strategic content scheduling.
3. Enhanced anomaly detection: With hourly breakdowns, unusual spikes or drops in performance can be detected and addressed more quickly, potentially limiting negative impacts.
4. More sophisticated reporting: Developers can now build tools that provide more nuanced performance insights, with visibility into intra-day fluctuations that might be missed in daily aggregates.
5. Improved integration capabilities: The expanded API functionality allows for better integration with other marketing tools and dashboards, creating more comprehensive analytics systems.

This update addresses long-standing requests from the SEO and developer community. According to Google, they "heard ecosystem requests to make this data more accessible loud and clear." The enhancement demonstrates Google's responsiveness to user needs while providing tools that enable more sophisticated analysis.

For agencies and in-house marketing teams, the ability to monitor performance at an hourly level creates opportunities for more agile marketing approaches. Content timing can be optimized based on hourly performance patterns, and teams can respond more quickly to changes in search behavior or algorithm updates.

The technical nature of the update also highlights the increasing sophistication of SEO tools and analysis. As Google continues to enhance its APIs, the barrier to entry for advanced SEO analytics is lowering, potentially democratizing access to powerful insights previously available only to larger organizations with custom solutions.

Technical considerations and limitations

While the update provides valuable new capabilities, there are some important technical considerations to note:

1. The API documentation specifies that when using the "HOURLY_ALL" dataState value, the hourly data might be partial, indicating that some data points may still be in the process of being collected.
2. The hourly granularity is only accessible through the API, not through the standard Search Console interface, which continues to show only the most recent 24 hours.
3. For authentication, the API requires either the "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/webmasters.readonly" or "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/webmasters" scope.
4. When grouping by the HOUR dimension, results are returned with timestamps in the format "YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss-07:00", using Pacific Time (UTC -7:00/8:00).

Future outlook

This update represents part of a broader trend of improved data accessibility and granularity from Google's search tools. The Search Console team has been actively enhancing data freshness throughout 2024 and into 2025, with this API update building on those improvements.

As marketing and SEO professionals integrate these new capabilities into their workflows and tools, we can expect to see more sophisticated analysis approaches emerging. The ability to study hourly patterns across multiple days may lead to new insights about search behavior and content performance that inform future best practices.

Google has invited feedback on the new functionality through their LinkedIn page or via the Google Search Central Community. This suggests potential for further refinements based on user experience and requirements.

Timeline

• December 12, 2024: Google launches the '24 hours' view in Search Console performance reports with improved data freshness
• April 9, 2025: Google extends hourly data capabilities to the Search Analytics API, providing up to 10 days of hourly data
• April 12, 2025: The hourly data feature is now available to developers and SEO professionals worldwide

The addition of hourly data to the Search Analytics API represents a significant enhancement to Google's SEO toolset, providing more timely and granular insights that enable more responsive and data-driven marketing strategies.