Mobile usability, Page Experience, rich results and robots.txt in Search Console: what exists now

Several guides still walk you through reports that Google has retired or changed. This page lists what exists today, with the dates Google gave, so you do not hunt for a menu item that is gone. In short: the Mobile Usability report and the Mobile-Friendly Test were retired on 1 December 2023, page experience is no longer a single report, and the robots.txt report, the rich result reports and the URL Inspection tool remain.

Mobile usability

The Mobile Usability report and the Mobile-Friendly Test went away on 1 December 2023, when Google removed mentions of them from its documentation “as they are going away” (documentation updates). If the report is missing in your property, it is not a bug. For improvements, including mobile usability, Google’s page experience guidance points to Lighthouse.

Page experience

There is no single page experience signal. Google says that Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems, while other page experience aspects do not directly help a site rank higher, and that it still looks for relevant content even when page experience is sub-par (Understanding page experience). Check secure pages in the HTTPS report, and see our article on the Core Web Vitals report for the metrics that do count.

Structured data and rich results

The rich result status reports mark each item valid or invalid, where invalid means at least one critical issue; reports exist for 19 listed types, such as breadcrumbs, products, recipes, review snippets and videos (rich result status reports). Valid markup does not guarantee a rich result: whether a feature shows is up to Google, and it is limited for some types. Preview a page with the Rich Results Test before you publish it.

FAQ and HowTo are the cautionary examples. On 14 September 2023 Google removed the How-to documentation because that rich result is no longer shown, and said the FAQ feature is shown only for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. So adding either markup for a rich result is not worth the effort for most sites.

robots.txt

The robots.txt report lists the files Google found for the top 20 hosts of a Domain property, up to two origins per host, when they were last crawled and any warnings or errors; the statuses are Not Fetched (404), Not Fetched (other reason) and Fetched. After you fix a file, use Request a recrawl from the settings icon (robots.txt report). To test whether a URL is blocked, use the URL Inspection tool; the help page describes a report, not a separate tester, so be wary of guides that mention one. And do not use robots.txt to keep a page out of the index: see the Page indexing statuses and use noindex.

404 and other broken pages

Use the Page indexing report, which lists Not found (404) and the other reasons with example URLs.

Guides age faster than the product

Search Console changes its reports without much notice, and tutorials keep describing old screens. When a menu item from a guide is missing, check Google’s documentation updates page before assuming your account is broken. Do not rely on a tutorial for menu paths; check Google’s help page, because reports are retired and renamed. The workspace also runs its own on-page and technical checks, such as titles, descriptions and headings, outside Search Console, so the loss of the Mobile Usability report does not leave you without a routine technical audit.

Go further

FAQ: Core Web Vitals: The page experience metrics that remain. FAQ: page indexing statuses: 404, noindex and robots.txt reasons. Docs: on-page and technical checks: The workspace’s own checks.