Google will Crawl & Index sites with only Googlebot Smartphone after July 5, 2024

Google embarking on final last step (that’s the plan!) of migration to a mobile-first index for Google Search: the small set of sites google have still been crawling with desktop Googlebot will be crawled with mobile Googlebot after July 5, 2024. Don’t worry, most websites don’t need to do anything!

As Google mentioned in last update on mobile indexing, Google crawls and indexes almost all websites using a smartphone crawler. Over the years, the number of sites that aren’t accessible on mobile has continued to shrink. To simplify our systems, and to make it easier for sites to debug issues related to device types, google will ll soon crawl all sites for Search with the Googlebot Smartphone crawler.

“The largest part of the web is already being crawled like this, and there is no change in crawling for these sites. After July 5, 2024, we’ll crawl and index these sites with only Googlebot Smartphone. If your site’s content is not accessible at all with a mobile device, it will no longer be indexable.”

You may still find Googlebot Desktop in your server logs and reporting. For example, among a few other Search features, Googlebot Desktop is sometimes used when crawling for product listings and Google for Jobs.