How Long Marketing Platforms Keep Your Data: 2026 Table

Every marketing platform keeps your history for a fixed window and then drops it, and the window keeps moving while you wait. Search Console shows 16 months and no more. GA4 explorations can be set as short as two months. Microsoft Clarity deletes most session recordings after 30 days. This table gives the documented window for 44 datasets on 20 platforms, read from each vendor's own documentation on September 25, 2026, and the export that preserves each one.

The finding that matters most sits in three vendor sentences. The Search Console bulk export's first file contains the day of the export. Bing Webmaster Tools cannot show data from before a site was added. A GA4 BigQuery export paused for exceeding its daily limit does not reprocess the missed days. None of those three recovers any of it. Every week an analytics project waits for a login is a week of the oldest Search Console history gone, and a new user cannot get it back.

Google's guide to debugging traffic drops tells site owners to choose "Last 16 months" in the Performance report and, to keep more than that, to use the Search Analytics API or bulk data exports and store the data in their own systems. The bulk export help page then sets the limit: the first export happens up to 48 hours after configuration, and it includes data for the day of the export. For anything earlier, Google points back to the API or the reports.

Put the three together and the sequence in a new engagement becomes clear. Access is requested; the oldest month of Search Console history expires while the request sits in someone's inbox; access arrives; the export is switched on and starts from that day. The 16 months visible at that moment are the most the project will ever have, and the API pull that captures them is the first job, not the last. Our client access checklist exists to shorten that wait.

"Rolling" means the window moves forward daily or monthly, so the oldest data drops off continuously. "API lookback" means a query limit rather than deletion of the stored data; those rows are excluded from the shortest-windows ranking that follows. Quoted words are the vendor's; everything else is our paraphrase of the page as read on September 25, 2026.

Two rows carry a conflict inside the vendor's own pages, and the table follows the more specific statement. Bing's October 2024 blog says 16 months while its help page still says six. The CrUX History API page's introduction says six months while its body says 40 weeks. Where a figure we were briefed with contradicted the documentation, the documentation won: Clarity heatmaps are kept up to nine months, not thirteen.

The chart ranks stored-data windows, not API lookbacks, and scales each bar to Google Ads' 37-month cap for daily data. The datasets most teams rely on for year-over-year work sit in the middle: 14 months for GA4 event data at the standard maximum, 16 for Search Console and Bing.

At the long end, four datasets outlast a typical client relationship: LinkedIn ads performance data for ten years, Google Ads monthly and larger rollups for eleven, GA4 360 at up to 50 months, and CrUX on BigQuery back to 2017. At the short end the 72-hour Clarity export API and Pinterest's 8-day hourly window are lookbacks rather than deletions, but they set the cadence of the job that stores them.

Google Ads' data retention page states that from June 1, 2026 hourly, daily and weekly reporting data is available for 37 months, while monthly, quarterly and annual data is kept for 11 years, after which it is not accessible through the interface or the APIs. Reach and frequency metrics are kept three years and the change history two. A daily export is now the only way to hold daily granularity past 37 months.

Meta's developer blog of October 16, 2025 set the second change: from January 12, 2026, unique-count and hourly breakdowns in the Ads Insights API are limited to 13 months of history and frequency breakdowns to six, while totals continue to be available for up to 37 months. The third is not new in 2026 but belongs on the same calendar: GA4's rule for growing properties, stated on its retention page: when a standard property becomes Large, event-level retention is automatically cut to two months and older event data is permanently deleted. A property that grows into that threshold loses a year of exploration history unless the BigQuery export is already running; our GA4 BigQuery export reference covers the setup.

The fifth job is a scheduled pull for every rolling ad dataset in the table: Google Ads change events every 30 days, click-level rows every 90, Meta breakdowns monthly, Amazon campaign reports weekly. Our analytics practice runs that schedule as the first deliverable of an engagement, and our note on the Search Console link report covers one more export that should be in it.