SEO & AEO

Mobile-first indexing

Also known as: mobile first indexing · mobile indexing

Definition

Mobile-first indexing means Google primarily uses the mobile version of a page's content to index it and to decide how it ranks. Anything that appears only on the desktop version may be missing from what Google has stored about the page.

The rule is parity. The mobile page should carry the same main content, headings, structured data, titles, descriptions and internal links as the desktop page. The common ways to break it are a mobile template that trims text, a menu that drops links, images with no alt text on mobile, and content that loads only after a tap. Text inside collapsed sections is fine as long as it is present in the page.

To test, run an important page through Search Console's URL Inspection and compare what Google's smartphone crawler fetched with what you see on desktop. For a bilingual site, test the Arabic version on a phone as well, because a right-to-left layout and Arabic fonts can behave differently from the English template.

How many of your visitors use phones is a question for your own analytics. DataReportal counted 24.9 million active cellular mobile connections in the UAE in late 2026, equal to 215% of the population. Connections are not people, so the figure shows how common phones are without telling you how your own audience browses. Look at the device split in GA4 before deciding which version to polish first.

More in SEO & AEO

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)

AEO is the practice of structuring content and data so AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite a business as a source when answering questions, including when no click follows.

AI citation

An AI citation is a reference to a source inside an AI-generated answer, usually a named link to the page the assistant drew on. A brand can also be mentioned without a link, and an answer can use a page without crediting it.

AI crawlers

AI crawlers are automated programs run by AI companies that fetch web pages, either to gather material for training models or to find content for an answer. Examples include OpenAI's GPTBot, Anthropic's ClaudeBot and Perplexity's PerplexityBot. Google-Extended is a robots.txt control rather than a separate crawler.