Free tool

Comparison calendar check

For two periods you name, what the calendar of the comparison lets anyone check from your Search Console export, and what it cannot check at all. Read in your browser, from the dates file alone.

How to get the export

1. 01

   In Search Console, open Performance, then Search results.

2. 02

   Set a date range that holds both periods you want to compare. The export carries dates only as rows, so the range you pick is the span this check can see.

3. 03

   Choose Export, then Download CSV. A zip arrives with seven files in it.

4. 04

   Drop the zip here as it is, or the CSV files from inside it, then name the two periods.

What it checks

Four things, all of them read from the date labels in the chart file and none of them from the figures. The checks count days, so they run only where the labels form a consecutive daily sequence. Where the file does not establish that, you can state that its rows are daily, and every line drawn from your statement says so.

Length

how many calendar days each period covers.

Coverage

whether every day in each period has a row in the file, and which days do not.

Overlap

whether the periods share any days, and how many.

Weekdays

how many of each weekday each period holds. Two periods that hold the same weekdays the same number of times line up; a four-week span split fifteen and thirteen does not, however balanced the span is.

Below the checks, a calendar: one square per day of the span, in rows of four weeks so that a column is always the same weekday, with the two periods marked and any day without a row left as a hole. Then the alternatives: pairs of equal length and equal weekday composition inside the span, ending on the last day you named and working back in whole weeks, at most four, longest first. They are proposals, not a verdict on the periods you chose.

What it will not say

That a comparison is fair. A calendar that lines up is one condition among several, and the others are outside the file: whether demand was the same in both periods, whether the same filters applied to both, whether the mix of pages and queries was the same, and whether the most recent days are final, since Search Console can report preliminary figures for recent days and the export does not say which ones. Every result names these as not checked. It also never adds up the clicks or impressions of the two periods: the moment it did, it would be making the comparison it refuses to judge.

What is counted

Your files and the periods you name are handled in this browser and never sent anywhere or kept. The one thing recorded is that the tool ran and how it ended, from a fixed list of outcomes, so nothing from a file or a form can be in it. The build that publishes this page fails if that list grows a free-text field.