Google hopeful the mobile-first index will launch by year’s end

But Gary Illyes says it might not go live until 2018.

Chat with SearchBot

In November 2016, Google launched their mobile-first index experiment and hoped to do enough testing to launch it sometime in the near future. Well, it seems this mobile-first index has proven to be a challenge for Google, and they may not even launch it this year.

At the Next10x Conference in Boston yesterday, Gary Illyes from Google said that while the team is hopeful that they will launch the mobile-first index by the end of the year, he feels that it is unlikely.

We asked Gary to confirm, and he told us that he did indeed say that at the event. He said the team working on the mobile-first index at Google “would like to launch by end of the year,” but Gary added he thinks “that’s unlikely to happen, at least fully.”

So if you are anxious about the mobile-first index going live with Google, there’s no need to panic right now — you have some time to get ready.

For more on the mobile-first index, see our FAQs on that category.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.