Mobile usability after the Search Console report retired

Google retired the mobile usability report and tool

The standalone Mobile Usability report in Search Console, the Mobile-Friendly Test tool, and its API were sunset on December 1, 2023. Google's official statement said the report had become less useful because better tooling exists, while mobile usability remains essential for success with Google Search. The old report's URL now redirects to the Lighthouse documentation, not to a replacement that looks like it.

That means there is no official single number in Search Console for 'mobile usable' anymore. The report was a health signal, not a ranking factor, and its retirement was explicitly a consolidation, not a demotion of mobile usability. The Core Web Vitals report still reports the mobile experience for real users and is the current field-data surface for it.

What replaced it: the mobile-first index

The important context is that everything Google indexes today is mobile-first. Google predominantly crawls and renders pages using a mobile user agent, which means the mobile experience has no escaping the crawl. A site that 'works on desktop but not mobile' is not being indexed as a desktop-only document; Google still fetches the mobile version and uses it for ranking.

The practical consequence is not that you must obsess over a mobile-specific report. The report does not exist anymore. The consequence is that page quality checks live in:

• Lighthouse (npm run lh:home or the DevTools panel), which audits mobile performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO on a throttled mobile profile with a category score.
• Search Console Core Web Vitals for field data on real mobile visitors. That report is the direct replacement for the mobile-focused page experience signal.
• Chrome DevTools device mode for visual and interaction checks of specific viewports without deploying.

The audit without the old tool

Lighthouse replaced both the private test and the report in the same movement. Run a budget-aware check:

npx lighthouse https://example.com/ --only-categories=performance,seo --preset=desktop
npx lighthouse https://example.com/ --only-categories=performance,seo --preset=mobile

The output gives you a mobile LCP, INP, and CLS, plus the page quality checks. The old Mobile-Friendly Test answered three questions: is the viewport set, is tap targets adequate, is text readable without zoom. Lighthouse still answers all of them with specific audit lines (Tap targets, Text is Illegible, Responsive).

The field story is the real one: a single lab run of Lighthouse proves a fix works, but warns nothing about real devices. The field signal lives in the Google Core Web Vitals report of Search Console. A site can load fine in a desktop Lighthouse run yet still return poor field data on mobile if the phone network or CPU dominates, which is what the report captures.

The practical replacement stack

1. Run Lighthouse on the mobile preset for every release that touches layout or assets, and keep the performance score against a budget.
2. Keep the responsive breakpoints honest: the mobile experience is a design choice, not a viewport afterthought.
3. Watch the mobile Core Web Vitals report in Search Console, and treat a 'poor' mobile field bucket as a release-blocker.

Mobile usability has not lost its meaning, it lost its dedicated report. The tools that replaced it are deeper (Lighthouse covers a full audit, Core Web Vitals measures real users), and the standard is the same as it has always been: the mobile experience must work, because that is the version Google tailors for its index.