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New Google Search Console adds filter for Web Light search appearance

For the first time, Google is showing webmasters how many of their visitors access their sites in Google search via the Web Light version for slower connections.

Barry Schwartz on June 14, 2018 at 9:46 am

Google announced it has added a search appearance filter to the new beta version of the Google Search Console to let you filter out search data for Web Light users. Web Light, as Google explains, is when Google will “transcode (convert) web pages on the fly into a version optimized for slow networks, so that these pages load faster while saving data.”

Google, for the first time, is showing webmasters how often Google is serving those pages to searchers. Often, these pages strip out a lot of your user interface features, and even some ads. But Google says it does “preserve a majority of the relevant content” while providing “a link for users to view the original page.”

The report for one of my sites shows that 22 percent of the time it is shown in the search results, Google is using Web Light to speed up the pages for those users. This specific site does get a lot of traffic from India and other countries that generally have slower internet speeds.

Here is a screen shot of the filter:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.