How long does Google keep your search history?

Google keeps your search history until you delete it, unless auto-delete is switched on, and whether it is on depends mostly on when you made your account. Auto-delete has three settings: 3, 18 or 36 months. Accounts created after Google's announcement of June 24, 2020 start with Web & App Activity, the setting that saves your searches, set to delete anything older than 18 months. Accounts that already had the setting on were left alone, which for most of them means everything since the day it was switched on is still there. Deleting is not instant either: Google's retention policy says removal generally takes around 2 months, including a recovery period of up to a month, and copies can stay in encrypted backups for up to 6 months.

Every clock on your search history, in one table

Your searches end up in several places, and each one runs on its own timetable. The first five rows are your Google Account; the rest are not.

The first row matters most: it describes every account opened before mid 2020 that nobody adjusted.

Why "forever" and "18 months" are both right

Two answers circulate: Google keeps your searches forever, or deletes them after 18 months. Both are true of different accounts, and the dividing line is a date.

Auto-delete arrived in May 2019. Google's announcement then offered a choice of "3 or 18 months," starting with Location History and Web & App Activity, and it was opt in: if you did nothing, your history stayed. A year later, on June 24, 2020, Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai changed the default for newcomers. Web & App Activity "auto-delete will also default to 18 months for new accounts," he wrote, so the data "will be automatically and continuously deleted after 18 months, rather than kept until you choose to delete it." YouTube history got a 36 month default for new accounts in the same post.

Existing accounts did not move. "If you've already had Location History and Web & App Activity turned on, we won't be changing your settings," the post says. Google promised instead to "actively remind" those users through notifications and emails. As 9to5Google summarized at the time, these settings had previously been "keep until you delete." So a Google Account opened in 2012 and never adjusted can still hold searches from 2012, while one opened in 2021 holds roughly the last 18 months.

Neither group is locked in. Google's help page today lists 3, 18 and 36 months alongside "Don't auto-delete activity," so a new account can be switched to keep everything and an old one can be switched to a short window. Auto-delete is also a rolling rule, not a single purge: each day, whatever crosses the line is removed.

What "deleted" means at Google

Google's retention policy says deletion "generally takes around 2 months from the time of deletion," and that this "often includes up to a month-long recovery period in case the data was removed unintentionally." Separately, Google's encrypted backups can hold data for "up to 6 months" as protection against disasters. The policy gives those as two figures and does not say whether the six months begin after the two, so the safe reading is that a copy can exist somewhere at Google for up to six months after you press the button.

From your side it is final. Search Help warns: "Once you erase your search history, you can't get it back." The recovery window is Google's, not yours.

Two exceptions sit on top. The retention policy says Google keeps some information "for the life of your Google Account if it's useful for helping us understand how users interact with our features," and Search Help adds that Google may "retain certain types of data for an extended period of time" for business or legal reasons. Closing the account ends the first exception, and Google can also close it for you: an account unused for two years may be deleted, as how long an inactive email account survives explains.

The ad logs run on a different clock

Your My Activity page is not the only record of a search. Google's servers also log requests, including those used for ads, and the retention policy gives that ad data a fixed timetable: Google says it will "anonymize" it by "removing part of the IP address after 9 months and cookie information after 18 months." Trimming the address matters because a full IP address can point to your connection.

Read that precisely. Anonymize here means removing part of the network address and the cookie details, not deleting the log entry. And the timetable is Google's, listed among data that "expires after a specific period," so nothing you choose in My Activity changes it. These logs are where an identifier stored in your browser meets Google's records, which is the mechanism cookies and pixels use to follow you between sites. How long that cookie itself survives on your side is a separate question with its own answer in the 400 day cap browsers now apply to cookies.

Signed out, Incognito and your browser

Google's own page on Search and your activity says your search history "might also be saved on your device," and names two places: "History that's stored by your browser" and "Google app searches saved while signed-out of your Google Account."

Signed out searches also shape what you see. Search Help says that when you search signed out you "may find recommendations related to your recent search," and that you can stop it by turning off Search customization in Google's Search settings.

Your browser's history is a separate record and Google's settings do not reach it. Search Help is direct: "Even if your search history isn't saved in your settings, or you delete it from saved history, your browser might track it." In Chrome, the source code sets that history to expire after 90 days: a constant named kExpireDaysThreshold equals 90, described as "the number of days old a history entry can be before it is considered 'old' and is deleted." The exception is the box under Web & App Activity labeled "Include Chrome history and activity from sites, apps, and devices that use Google services." Tick it and your Chrome browsing joins your account history and its clock.

Incognito is the cleanest option Google offers: Search Help says your search history "isn't saved to your Google Account when you search and browse in Incognito mode." It is narrower than it sounds, though, because a private window only changes what your own device keeps. Your internet provider still sees that you reached Google, and how long ISPs keep your browsing history sets out what each country requires.

Where these numbers stop

• Other Google products run their own settings. YouTube history and Location History have separate controls; YouTube's default for accounts made since June 2020 is 36 months.
• Gemini is not your search history. Chats with Google's assistant sit under their own activity setting, which how long AI assistants keep your chats compares with ChatGPT and the rest.
• The legal retention exception has no stated length, so for data held under it, none of these clocks apply.
• Policies change. These are the figures on Google's help and policy pages as they read in October 2026.

Setting the clock you want

1. Check your auto-delete setting. In My Activity, open Web & App Activity and look at the auto-delete option. "Off" means everything since you turned the setting on is still there.
2. Pick the shortest window you can live with. Three months is the shortest Google offers.
3. Clear the backlog once. Auto-delete only stops the history growing older than the window; use "Delete all time" if you want the past gone now.
4. Decide about Chrome. Untick "Include Chrome history" if you do not want your browsing stored in your account.
5. Clear your browser separately, because no Google Account setting reaches it, and turn off Search customization if you search signed out.
6. Ask for what is left. In the UK and EU you can ask Google for the data it holds and to erase it, and how to make a data request has the wording.