As catalytic processes become more important in academic and industrial applications, an intimate understanding is highly desirable to improve their efficiency on a rational basis. Because thorough mechanistic investigations require an elaborate and expensive spectroscopic and theoretical analysis, it is a major goal to link mechanistic insights to simple descriptors, such as the reducibility, that are accessible by temperature-programmed reduction (TPR) experiments, to bridge the gap between fundamental understanding and application of catalysts. In this work, we present a detailed in-situ spectroscopic analysis of TPR results from loading-dependent VO x /CeO 2 catalysts, using in-situ multiwavelength Raman, IR, UV−vis, and quasi-in-situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy as well as in-situ X-ray diffraction. The catalyst reduction shows a complex network of different processes, contributing to the overall reducibility, which are controlled by the unique interaction at the vanadia−ceria interface. The temperatures at which they occur depend significantly on the nuclearity of the surface vanadia species. By elucidating the temperature-and vanadia loading-dependent behavior, we provide a fundamental understanding of the underlying molecular processes, thus developing an important basis for interpretation of the reduction behavior of other oxide catalysts.