Google’s mobile-first indexing now powers over half of Google’s search results. Google announced Wednesday that over half of the pages shown in search results globally are from Google indexing that content using a mobile-first indexing procedure. That means that it is more likely that the pages you visit from a Google search are based on how Google crawled and indexed that content based on the mobile version of that page. What is mobile-first indexing? Mobile-first indexing is how Google crawls and indexes the web. Instead of looking at the desktop version of the page, Google looks at the page’s mobile version. Simply put, Google crawls and indexes your web page based on how it renders on a mobile phone versus a desktop computer.
Where can I learn more? We have many stories and articles about mobile-first indexing on this site. Here are some of the more important stories: More advice. Google will typically notify you when your site has moved to mobile-first indexing within Google Search Console. So make sure to check your messages in the Google Search Console.
Google will also label your site as last crawled by the Googlebot smartphone user agent in the URL inspection tool as another signal that your site has moved over. With this change, Google says you should pay attention to your structured data and alt-text for images on mobile pages. Why does it matter? Your rankings may be impacted if your desktop pages differ from your mobile pages in content and structured data.
Google has generally moved sites with parity between mobile and desktop pages first to mobile-first indexing. But with over half of the search results now indexed through mobile-first indexing, it is just a matter of time before your web pages are moved over as well.
