A few months ago, Google made waves in the digital marketing sector by announcing a significant enhancement to its Search Console. The introduction of the '24 hours' view has allowed users to access performance data from the most recent 24 hours, with only a few hours of delay. This new feature has proven to be invaluable for webmasters and SEO professionals, as it enables them to quickly assess which pages and search queries are performing well during this time frame. Furthermore, it provides insights into how newly published content is resonating with audiences.

Today, Google is taking another step forward by expanding its capabilities with the addition of support for hourly data in the Search Analytics API. This enhancement comes in direct response to the requests from the ecosystem, signaling Google's commitment to making performance data more accessible and useful. Unlike the product interface, which only displays hourly data for the past 24 hours, the API now offers a more robust solution: it will return hourly data for a span of up to 10 days. This extended range allows developers to build sophisticated tools that not only present hourly data for the latest day but also facilitate comparisons with the same day from the previous week. Such comparisons can be extremely beneficial when analyzing weekly patterns and trends.

To facilitate the retrieval of hourly data from the Search Analytics API, Google is implementing two key changes to the API request body. First, they are introducing a new dimension called HOUR, which allows users to organize the response based on individual hours. Additionally, there is a new data state value named HOURLY_ALL, which should be utilized when grouping by HOUR. This value indicates that the hourly data provided may be partial, ensuring transparency in the data reporting process.

For clarity, here is a sample API request that showcases how to pull the hourly data:

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

The corresponding sample API response is structured as follows:

{ "rows" : [ { "keys" : [ "2025-04-07T00:00:00-07:00" ], "clicks" : 17610 , "impressions" : 1571473 , "ctr" : 0.011206046810858348 , "position" : 10.073871456906991 }, { "keys" : [ "2025-04-07T01:00:00-07:00" ], "clicks" : 18289 , "impressions" : 1662252 , "ctr" : 0.011002543537321658 , "position" : 9.5440029550272758 }, { "keys" : [ "2025-04-07T02:00:00-07:00" ], "clicks" : 18548 , "impressions" : 1652038 , "ctr" : 0.011227344649457216 , "position" : 9.81503633693656 }, { "keys" : [ "2025-04-07T03:00:00-07:00" ], "clicks" : 18931 , "impressions" : 1592716 , "ctr" : 0.01188598595104212 , "position" : 9.4956935197486558 }, { "keys" : [ "2025-04-07T04:00:00-07:00" ], "clicks" : 20519 , "impressions" : 1595636 , "ctr" : 0.012859449147549943 , "position" : 9.4670100198290843 },  ], "responseAggregationType" : "byProperty" }

Google hopes that this enhancement will empower users to better monitor their recently published content in a timely and effective manner, enabling quicker decision-making based on the most relevant data. The team at Google is eager to hear feedback from users regarding this new hourly data view. They invite users to share their thoughts and any suggestions for improvement, urging them to connect via LinkedIn or engage within the Google Search Central Community.