Mobile-First Indexing

Mobile-first indexing means Google crawls, indexes and assesses a website from its mobile version. What a mobile visitor can see and read is what counts in Google's index; the desktop version is secondary in that context. This is how Google works today for every website.

In practice Google visits the pages with Googlebot Smartphone, a crawler that behaves like a mobile browser. Content that exists only in the desktop version falls out of the equation: if half the product copy is hidden away on mobile, Google judges the page on half the text. The same logic applies to structured data, meta tags, images and internal links. Everything that carries the SEO has to be present in the mobile version.

For most modern sites that is no obstacle, because responsive design lets mobile and desktop share the same HTML. Problems tend to appear where the mobile version is a stripped-down edition with collapsed sections, removed menu items or images without alt text.

Mobile-first indexing is often confused with mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal, but the two are separate things. Mobile-friendliness concerns how well a page works on a small screen, and speed and stability belong there, measured through Core Web Vitals on data from real users. Mobile-first indexing decides which version of the site underpins Google's assessment at all. The guide to crawling, indexing and bot control covers how that version is inspected.