Google Killed the Mobile-Friendly Test. Here's What to Use Instead.

For the better part of a decade, the Google Mobile-Friendly Test was the go-to gut-check for anyone shipping a website. Paste a URL, wait a few seconds, get a green "Page is mobile-friendly" badge or a list of things Googlebot didn't like. It was free, official, and universally trusted.

Then Google quietly killed it. The tool was retired in December 2023, along with the Mobile Usability report in Search Console. The old URL now returns a 404 or a "this tool is no longer available" notice depending on which cached version you hit. So — what replaces it?

Why Google took it down

Google's public reasoning was simple: "the mobile web has matured." In 2015 when the tool launched, roughly half of all sites were unusable on a phone. By 2023, mobile-first design was the default and the pass rate was so high that the tool was essentially telling everyone "you're fine". So they pulled it and folded the checks into the Page Experience signals inside Search Console.

That's the official story. The practical reality: you still need to check your site on mobile, and now the answer is scattered across three or four different tools instead of one.

What Google looks at now

Mobile-friendliness hasn't disappeared as a ranking factor — it's just baked in. Under the hood, Google evaluates the same handful of things it always did:

• Viewport meta tag — is <meta name="viewport"> configured correctly?
• Text legibility — is the body text at least ~16px and readable without pinch-zoom?
• Tap target spacing — are buttons and links large enough (~48×48px) and spaced apart?
• Horizontal scrolling — does content fit within the viewport, or does it force a sideways scroll?
• Compatibility — no Flash, no fixed-width layouts, no crushed images.

The tools that actually replace it

1. Lighthouse (in Chrome DevTools)

Open your site, hit F12, go to the Lighthouse tab, tick "Mobile" and "Performance + Accessibility + SEO", and run it. The SEO audit checks the viewport tag, font sizes, and tap targets — the exact same checks the old Mobile-Friendly Test ran. Free, official, no signup.

2. PageSpeed Insights

Same Lighthouse engine, but hosted at pagespeed.web.dev. You paste a URL, it runs both mobile and desktop audits, and gives you real-world Core Web Vitals data from actual Chrome users if your site has enough traffic. This is the closest thing Google has to an official mobile-friendliness score today.

3. Search Console → Page Experience

Log into Search Console, open the Page Experience report, and you'll see which of your URLs are passing or failing on mobile. It's how Google now surfaces mobile problems at scale, across your whole site instead of one URL at a time.

4. A real mobile preview

Automated audits catch the technical stuff. They miss the human stuff — CTAs floating off-screen, a modal that can't be dismissed on iOS, a photo carousel that eats the whole viewport. For that you need eyes on a real device (or a realistic simulator like MobileReady) and about 90 seconds of poking around.

A quick 5-minute mobile-friendly checklist

1. Run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and one deep page.
2. Fix any red flags in the SEO section (viewport, font size, tap targets).
3. Open the site on your phone and scroll the whole page.
4. Try to complete your primary CTA (buy, sign up, contact) with one thumb.
5. Check Search Console's Page Experience report weekly, not daily.

The honest truth

If your site was mobile-friendly in 2023, it almost certainly still is. The retirement of the tool wasn't Google downgrading mobile — it was Google saying the war is won. What matters now is whether your site is nice to use, not whether it passes a robot's checklist. Test it like a person would use it. That's the only test that ever actually mattered.