Your Website Changed. Did the AI Get the Memo?
ken_walger·
Google's Search Central insights highlight the complex timelines governing modern web crawling, indexing, and serving infrastructure. While discovering a new URL typically takes about 20 hours and full end-to-end indexing takes 1.5 hours post-crawl, refreshing an existing URL can take up to 30 days, and settling site moves can take months. These processing latencies directly impact how both traditional search engines and AI retrieval-augmented generation systems surface updated content. For backend engineers and software architects managing web services, understanding these internal scheduling rhythms is critical. It underscores that publishing new content or API endpoints is only the first step; system designs must account for multi-day index synchronization latencies when relying on third-party crawlers and AI retrieval pipelines.