Tuesday, while I was on stage on the mobile-first Google panel I heard a rumor that Google’s Gary Illyes may have said that the new Google Search Console shows data only from the mobile first index.

Here is a tweet covering that from the panel:

Well that is wrong.

I was actually shocked to hear that and while on stage I said I find that hard to believe.

Gary Illyes from Google confirmed it was a miscommunication and posted on Twitter “I think we misunderstood each other, most likely I misunderstood you: both reports are fed from one index, there’s no differences between the reports in that sense.”

Gary clarified it again on Twitter:

Even John Mueller said no, this is not right:

And Danny Sullivan also:

Logically it just does not make sense. The same data is fed to both versions of Google Search Console. Google’s mobile first index switches on a site by site basis, if your site is not yet in the mobile first index (which is the case for most sites) then Google doesn’t index your site yet as a mobile phone and thus doesn’t have data from the mobile first index for your site to pass to the new or old Google Search Console.

It is an indexing thing, it is separate from how the Google Search Console reports work, separate from ranking, etc. Yes, they are somewhat related because it is all search but they are very separate.

So if anyone thought this, get it out of your head. 🙂

Forum discussion at Twitter.