How do I check mobile usability errors in Google Search Console?

Q: How do I check mobile usability errors in Google Search Console?

You can't: Google retired the Mobile Usability report and Mobile-Friendly Test in December 2023. Use Lighthouse, URL Inspection and Core Web Vitals now.

You can't in Search Console any more. Google retired the Mobile Usability report, the Mobile-Friendly Test tool and the Mobile-Friendly Test API on 1 December 2023. Mobile usability still matters, because Google indexes the mobile version of your pages, but the checks now happen elsewhere: Lighthouse for usability problems, the URL Inspection live test for what Googlebot's smartphone crawler sees, and the Core Web Vitals report for real visitors' experience on phones.

Why Google retired it

Google announced the change in its April 2023 post on page experience. It stressed that this "doesn't mean that mobile usability isn't important", only that other robust resources for evaluating mobile usability had appeared, naming Lighthouse from Chrome. Mobile-friendliness remains part of Google's page experience guidance.

What to use instead

What you want to know	Where to check
Layout and usability problems on a phone	Lighthouse in mobile mode, from Chrome DevTools or PageSpeed Insights
What Googlebot's smartphone crawler rendered	URL Inspection, Test live URL, then the screenshot (only the live test has one)
How fast and stable pages are for real mobile visitors	Core Web Vitals report, mobile view
Whether Google missed content on mobile	URL Inspection's rendered HTML compared with the desktop page

The mobile-first checklist Google still publishes

Google uses the mobile version of a page, crawled with its smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking. Its mobile-first indexing guide asks you to make sure that:

The mobile page has the same primary content as the desktop page. Tabs and accordions are fine.
Structured data, titles and meta descriptions match across both versions.
The robots meta tags match too, with no noindex on mobile.
Primary content doesn't wait for a swipe, click or typing to load, since Google won't perform those actions.
Images keep the same URLs and alt text, and videos are easy to find on mobile.
robots.txt doesn't block resources or mobile-specific URLs Google needs.

If an old guide mentions "Validate fix" for mobile issues

That workflow belonged to the retired report. There is nothing to validate now. Fix the page, confirm with a Lighthouse run and a live test in URL Inspection, and let the next crawl pick it up.

How AutoPSEO helps

The site audit in AutoPSEO's research tools runs Lighthouse on your homepage and on one page per URL pattern, up to ten pages, in both mobile and desktop modes, alongside its crawl checks. The Core Web Vitals report charts real-user data from the Chrome UX Report for phones and desktops separately, and every Search Console report can be filtered by device to see whether mobile clicks are slipping.