How Often Does Google Earth Update?
Google Earth updates its imagery on a rolling basis, not globally or all at once. The update schedule is tied to location type, population density, terrain, and strategic or commercial interest.
How Often Different Areas Receive Updates
Google Earth does not update every area on the same schedule. Updates happen regionally and are influenced by usage patterns, change over time, and image quality.
Urban vs Rural
Urban areas are usually updated every 1 to 3 years. These include major cities like New York, London, and Tokyo. Their higher density makes them a frequent target for refreshed imagery using aerial surveys and commercial satellite feeds.
In contrast, rural or remote regions can go without updates for 5 to 10 years. Locations like deserts, mountains, and sparsely populated agricultural zones fall into this category. These areas change slowly and are expensive to image using high-resolution aerial methods. Because of that, updates are deprioritized.
Middle-tier cities—areas with moderate size or industrial relevance—tend to see updates every 2 to 4 years. Strategic political zones or prominent landmarks may be refreshed more frequently.
High-Priority vs Low-Priority Areas
Some updates are triggered by events. After wildfires, floods, or earthquakes, Google coordinates with satellite data providers to update affected areas within days. For example, British Columbia fire zones in 2024 received imagery within 72 hours. During the 2025 tsunami in parts of Southeast Asia, updated images were made available in less than a week.
High-priority locations such as capital cities, military zones, or key industrial sites are also updated more often. However, sensitive government areas may have update restrictions. In 2024, Google Earth froze updates to certain parts of Taiwan under external requests.
Update Frequency Schedule
Google Earth releases updated imagery roughly twice a month, concentrating on narrow geographic areas during each release. Updated zones can be identified using the official KML file from Google, which highlights recent changes. These updates may include only a few urban centers per cycle. Most users will not notice a change unless their area is explicitly targeted.
Technology, Processing, and Data Sources
The frequency of Google Earth updates is also tied to the type of imagery source and processing time.
Image Sources
Google Earth pulls imagery from a mix of satellite systems, aerial photography, and commercial providers. Public satellites like Landsat gather global images every 16 days. Copernicus Sentinel-2 captures every 5 days. However, resolution is sometimes limited, and clouds interfere with usable photos.
Google also licenses higher-resolution images from companies like Maxar and Airbus. These systems can capture images at 30 to 50 cm resolution and revisit high-interest zones weekly. However, this costs more money, so most regions do not receive that level of frequency.
Street View updates follow a different schedule. Urban routes in major countries are updated every 1 to 2 years using Google cars. Pedestrian areas use backpack-mounted cameras and are updated every 3 to 5 years depending on accessibility.
In 2024, Google also allowed local contributors to use portable vehicle-mounted 360° cameras to increase coverage. This led to more than 12 million miles of new Street View data in one year across 30 countries.
AI-Driven Enhancements
Processing delays are a major bottleneck. Images go through cloud and haze removal, stitching, and correction. Starting in 2024, a machine learning tool called Cloud Score+ began helping with cloud detection and removal.
This automated process clears images faster and allows more frequent usable updates in previously hard-to-image areas like the Pacific or Southeast Asia.
In some tropical countries like Indonesia, the heavy cloud coverage used to slow updates to once every 3 to 5 years. Since Cloud Score+ was integrated, some of these locations are now refreshed every 18 to 24 months.
Google Earth Engine handles these processing tasks across hundreds of petabytes of data. The addition of AI has helped scale processing, but updates are still not uniform.
Comparisons, Use Cases, and Access to More Frequent Data
Google Earth is a consumer-focused platform and does not aim to provide real-time updates. Some users and industries require fresher data than what Google Earth provides by default.
Third-Party Update Services
Private imagery providers like XRTech, Planet Labs, and Maxar offer higher-frequency updates. XRTech supplies daily 15 cm resolution images of sites like Las Vegas Airport. These services are used by airports, construction firms, agricultural operations, and logistics providers that cannot rely on a 2 to 3-year update cycle.
Agricultural businesses in the Brazilian Cerrado, for example, supplement Google Earth’s semi-annual updates with drone-based surveys on a weekly basis.
These services come at a cost, and licensing is often limited to specific zones. Companies typically pay only for areas of operational interest.
Timelapse and Historical Data
Historical imagery is another Google Earth feature. The system now includes data going back over 90 years for some locations. Cities like London, Paris, and Berlin have aerial photos dating back to the 1930s.
Google Earth’s Timelapse tool compiles 40 years of satellite data to show environmental changes like water body shrinkage or city expansion. New content was added in 2024, giving users access to images through late 2023.
It’s also worth noting that historical imagery layers can contain newer data than the default image shown when opening a location. This happens when newer images are not yet processed into the active base map.
Real-Time Layers
In 2025, Google began testing real-time overlays using sensors from the International Space Station and NOAA satellites. These layers deliver near-live data on air quality, weather, and radiation levels with delays as short as 30 minutes.
Custom applications using the Earth Engine API can now overlay high-frequency data sources. The World Resources Institute uses this feature to generate 15-minute deforestation alerts, which are layered on top of the base map provided by Google Earth.
User Expectations, Privacy Limits, and Regional Patterns
Many users assume the imagery they see is current. In reality, it is often several years old. Google Earth shows the image capture date in the bottom corner of the interface. Users should check this before relying on the data for time-sensitive uses.
Held-Back Imagery
Sometimes, even when new images are available, they are not publicly released immediately. When the Lakhta Center skyscraper in Moscow was completed in 2024, local users noticed no image update. Google later confirmed the imagery had been collected months earlier but was held back to align with a larger Eastern Europe package release.
These reserve batches, also called “sleeping updates,” are used to maintain consistency across regions.
Regional Spending and Priorities
Procurement records from 2024 show that Google spends 43 percent of its imagery budget on North America and Europe, 31 percent on Asia-Pacific, and 26 percent elsewhere. This spending distribution impacts update frequency.
However, in some cases, specialized grants improve update speed. Antarctica’s cycle was reduced from 7 years to 3 years after research partnerships with the British Antarctic Survey were signed in 2022.
Cultural and environmental zones also receive attention. UNESCO World Heritage sites like Easter Island are updated quarterly using a mix of ground-surveyed 3D scanners and commercial satellite sources.
Summary
Google Earth updates some locations every few months and others every several years. Most urban areas are refreshed every 1 to 3 years, while rural or hard-to-reach zones may wait 5 or more years. Natural disasters and strategic events can trigger faster imagery timelines.
Google uses a mix of free satellite feeds, commercial image sources, and AI-powered processing to maintain its imagery collection. While the platform does not offer real-time images, integration with sensors and third-party APIs brings some near-live data capabilities.
For higher-frequency needs, customers use other services that offer daily image refreshes at higher resolutions. Users must always check the image capture date displayed in the program before using the data for anything time-sensitive.
No one platform shows the whole picture, and knowing how often images are updated helps set realistic expectations for planning and decision-making.