Google’s well-known ‘mobile-friendly’ label, which appears next to properly optimized web pages in mobile search results, is being discontinued. The company announced that this change aims to streamline search results.
Google introduced the mobile-friendly label two years ago to help users find pages that can be easily read on mobile phones. According to Google, 85% of all pages in mobile search results now meet the mobile-friendly criteria.
Due to this increase in mobile-friendly web pages, Google likely believes it’s no longer necessary to indicate when a page is ‘mobile-friendly.’ Consequently, the label is being removed entirely.
Site owners can still use the mobile usability report in Search Console and the mobile-friendly testing tool to determine if their pages meet Google’s mobile-friendly standards.
This change is purely aesthetic and has no impact on the criteria used by Google’s mobile-friendly ranking signal or the ranking of web pages in Google’s mobile search results.
