Mobile and desktop get different robots rules
In the reportPages serve different robots directives to mobile and desktop
mobile_robots_directive_mismatch · Issue
This appears when the two browser profiles receive different robots directives after noindex is excluded. Confirm whether the difference is intentional, then align the mobile and desktop output. A difference limited to snippet controls is kept for review.
Severity: High. Fix unintended differences soon: device-specific rules can make your indexing or snippet policy inconsistent.
Why it matters
Search engines recommend equivalent robots directives on mobile and desktop. Different directives can conflict with your intended policy; this check does not show which directive a search engine applied.
What to do
- Compare the saved desktop-only and smartphone-only directive samples and the total difference count. Samples may omit tokens from a long difference.
- Check the mobile template, plugin and response headers that add or omit directives, and align the intended output.
- Run another audit to obtain a sufficient comparison of the same page.
When to leave it as it is: Keep a snippet-only review item if the different snippet controls are intentional and you have checked their effect. Dismissal records that judgment; it does not mark the technical difference fixed.
What we read
We compare smartphone Chrome with desktop Chrome using two observations of each request profile. The smartphone crawl response supplies the first observation; we then collect a desktop response and a confirmation for each profile. These are browser request profiles, not observations of Googlebot.
The audit freezes a sample before comparison. Its size is the smaller of the eligible page count and the square root of the admitted representative page count, rounded up and limited to 10–100. Selection prioritises an eligible homepage, unresolved rechecks including dismissed findings, then pages from different sections. This does not guarantee every section or template.
A blocked request, cancellation, exhausted comparison budget, incomplete required artifact or challenge leaves the comparison unknown. The content and directive checks require four usable 200 HTML responses. A confirmed smartphone-only status failure belongs to the separate status check and leaves the other three checks unknown.
Both profiles read <meta name="robots">, <meta name="googlebot"> and the same unscoped or Googlebot-scoped X-Robots-Tag directives. Complete robots artifacts and stable directive sets are required in both rounds. We compare the sets after removing noindex; explicit defaults such as index, follow still count as tokens.
Example & evidence
Illustrative example — stable robots output in two browser profiles, not a live audit.
Desktop Chrome receives no robots meta in both observations. Smartphone Chrome receives:
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">The smartphone-only nofollow repeats, so this is an issue. A difference limited to nosnippet would be a review item.
A possible correction: remove the unintended mobile-only directive so both profiles receive the same set.
Confirm & check again
Check for yourself: Compare the raw server HTML and the separate X-Robots-Tag fields for smartphone Chrome and desktop Chrome. Repeat both requests to distinguish a stable profile difference from changing output.
Check again: Full audit — Run another audit after correcting the response. The finding closes only when sufficient retained evidence gives a clean result for the same requested page and native final-URL identity. An unread or unselected comparison does not establish a fix. Moving to another final URL, or serving the old final URL through another page, does not fix the original finding. Dismissal is separate from technical state and does not remove the page from recheck consideration.
Limits & sources
The reported sample N of M describes the frozen selection among admitted representative pages in this audit, not every page on the website. Selected pages with incomplete evidence remain in N. An unavailable sample has an explicit reason; it is not a zero-page success.
These requests do not establish what a search crawler received or how it indexed the page. Responses can differ by time, location or other request properties. Missing evidence never counts as a pass.
Identical Googlebot-scoped directives in both responses do not create a difference. Incomplete physical header evidence makes the comparison unavailable. The rule compares tokens and does not decide whether a difference changes search results.
Confidence: High because the complete directive sets repeat within both browser profiles before their difference is reported.
Sources
- Google, Mobile site and mobile-first indexing best practices — asks for the same robots meta tags on mobile and desktop. Checked 25 September 2026.
Editorial review: 3 November 2026