Over the years since announcing mobile-first indexing - Google's crawling of the web using a smartphone Googlebot - our analysis has shown that new websites are generally ready for this method of crawling. Accordingly, we're happy to announce that mobile-first indexing will be enabled by default for all new, previously unknown to Google Search, websites starting July 1, 2019. It's fantastic to see that new websites are now generally showing users - and search engines - the same content on both mobile and desktop devices!

You can continue to check for mobile-first indexing of your website by using the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console. By looking at a URL on your website there, you'll quickly see how it was last crawled and indexed. For older websites, we'll continue monitoring and evaluating pages for their readiness for mobile first indexing, and will notify them through Search Console once they're seen as being ready. Since the default state for new websites will be mobile-first indexing, there's no need to send a notification.


Using the URL Inspection Tool to check the mobile-first indexing status

Our guidance on making all websites work well for mobile-first indexing continues to be relevant, for new and existing sites. For existing websites we determine their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on parity of content (including text, images, videos, links), structured data, and other meta-data (for example, titles and descriptions, robots meta tags). We recommend double-checking these factors when a website is launched or significantly redesigned.

While we continue to support responsive web design, dynamic serving, and separate mobile URLs for mobile websites, we recommend responsive web design for new websites. Because of issues and confusion we've seen from separate mobile URLs over the years, both from search engines and users, we recommend using a single URL for both desktop and mobile websites.

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. We’ll continue to monitor and evaluate this change carefully. If you have any questions, please drop by our Webmaster forums or our public events. Posted by John Mueller, Developer Advocate, Google Zurich

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Be among the first to test new features

Your help is invaluable to making sure our products work for everyone. We shared some new features that we're still testing and would love your feedback and participation.
A large crowd at Google I/O

Learn more about what's coming soon

I/O is a place where we get to showcase new Search features, so we're excited to give you a heads up on what's next on the horizon:
Two people posing for a photo at Google I/O, forming a heart with their arms

We hope these cool announcements help & inspire you to create even better websites that work well in Search. Should you have any questions, feel free to post in our webmaster help forums, contact us on Twitter, or reach out to us at any of the next events we're at.

Posted by Lizzi Harvey, Technical Writer
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Your content can also start surfacing on the Assistant through new voice guided experiences. This feature lets you expand your content to new surfaces, to help users complete tasks wherever they are, and interactively progress through the steps using voice commands.

As shown in the Google Home Hub example below, the Assistant provides a conversational, hands-free experience that can help users complete a task. This is an incredibly lightweight way for web developers to expand their content to the Assistant. For more information about How-to for the Assistant, visit Build a How-to Guide Action with Markup.


How-to for the Assistant    How-to for the Assistant

To help you monitor How-to markup issues, we launched a report in Search Console that shows all errors, warnings and valid items for pages with HowTo structured data. Learn more about how to use the report to monitor your results.

Search Console enhancement report

FAQ on Search and the Google Assistant

An FAQ page provides a list of frequently asked questions and answers on a particular topic. For example, an FAQ page on an e-commerce website might provide answers on shipping destinations, purchase options, return policies, and refund processes. By using FAQPage structured data, you can make your content eligible to display these questions and answers to display directly on Google Search and the Assistant, helping users to quickly find answers to frequently asked questions.

FAQ structured data is only for official questions and answers; don't add FAQ structured data on forums or other pages where users can submit answers to questions - in that case, use the Q&A Page markup.

You can learn more about implementation details in the FAQ developer documentation.

FAQ on Search


To provide more ways for users to access your content, FAQ answers can also be surfaced on the Google Assistant. Your users can invoke your FAQ content by asking direct questions and get the answers that you marked up in your FAQ pages. For more information, visit Build an FAQ Action with Markup.
FAQ on Google Assistant


To help you monitor FAQ issues and search appearance, we also launched an FAQ report in Search Console that shows all errors, warnings and valid items related to your marked-up FAQ pages.

We would love to hear your thoughts on how FAQ or How-to structured data works for you. Send us any feedback either through Twitter or our forum.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Damian Biollo, Patrick Nevels, and Yaniv Loewenstein


What that means for you

Compared to the previous version, Googlebot now supports 1000+ new features, like:

You should check if you’re transpiling or use polyfills specifically for Googlebot and if so, evaluate if this is still necessary. There are still some limitations, so check our troubleshooter for JavaScript-related issues and the video series on JavaScript SEO.

Any thoughts on this? Talk to us on Twitter, the webmaster forums, or join us for the online office hours.

Posted by Martin Splitt, friendly internet fairy at the Webmasters Trends Analyst team

This list is only a small part of the agenda that we think is useful to webmasters and SEOs. There are many more sessions that you could find interesting! To learn about those other talks, check out the full list of “web” sessions, design sessions, Cloud sessions, machine learning sessions, and more. Use the filtering function to toggle the sessions on and off.

We hope you can make the time to watch the talks online, and participate in the excitement of I/O ! The videos will also be available on Youtube after the event, in case you can't tune in live.

Posted by Vincent Courson, Search Outreach Specialist
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