Mobile-First Indexing

Mobile-first indexing means that Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a website's content for indexing and ranking. Since the majority of Google searches now occur on mobile devices, Google shifted from using the desktop version of pages as the primary index to using the mobile version. As of 2024, all new sites are mobile-first by default, and this has been Google's primary indexing approach for years.

For mobile-first indexing to work correctly, the mobile version of a site must contain the same content as the desktop version. Sites that hide content behind tabs or accordions on mobile, serve different HTML to mobile users, or use separate mobile subdomains with less content risk having their content incompletely indexed. Responsive web design — where the same HTML is served to all devices and CSS handles layout adaptation — is the recommended approach.