Google is making a nice change to Google Search this July. The company today announced that it will now be using mobile-first indexing for all new domains by default.

The company first announced mobile-first indexing back in 2016. The idea behind the system is that there’s a smartphone Googlebot that indexes your sites how a user sees it on a mobile device. And that makes a lot of sense as most web sites now have responsive designs and display the same content on mobile devices and desktops.

Google has been testing the smartphone Googlebot for a long while, and it’s been slowing rolling it out. And it seems like mobile-first indexing might soon be the default for all sites. “Mobile-first indexing has come a long way. We’re happy to see how the web has evolved from being focused on desktop, to becoming mobile-friendly, and now to being mostly crawlable and indexable with mobile user-agents! We realize it has taken a lot of work from your side to get there, and on behalf of our mostly-mobile users, we appreciate that,” the company said.

If you are a web developer and want to check whether your site is being crawled by the smartphone Googlebot, you can do so from the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console. Google says the company will continue to look into the performance of the new mobile-first indexing and make changes accordingly going forward.

Tagged with Google, Google Search