Can somebody become a google search console owner by accident? most likely your previous seo agency

Question

A few months back we got an update that a new email id has become the owner of GSC. Even though nobody from our company did that. The email id was of our previous seo agency. Is it possible that someone from that company accessed the account by accident? Also is it possible that all previous crawling data from google search console will get removed if someone removes that google search console code.

Answer 1

It's impossible for it to be an accident.

What you can do, is to determine which method they used to gain access:

• In GSC, go to settings, and click on ownership verification. You'll see there which method they used (Domain Name Provider, Uploaded File, etc.).
• If the access was granted by Domain Name Provider, check your DNS at wherever you manage the DNS (registrar, Cloudflare, etc.), and remove the corresponding entries
• If the access was granted by Uploaded File, remove the file from your server.
• After that, revoke their access in GSC.

For your second question, you can't delete the data there. The owner can access it without problems. If, for some reason, your access was removed, and you restore it, sometimes it can take Google 2 to 3 days to display the data again.