Bing Will Roll Out Their Mobile Friendly Ranking Algorithm In The Upcoming Months
Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land :
Context & Ripple Effects
Bing's announcement lands weeks after Google's mobile friendly algorithm update began rolling out on April 21, 2015 — the change webmasters dubbed 'mobilegeddon' and scrambled to prepare for. Bing confirming its own mobile-friendly ranking signal means site owners now face the same compliance pressure from both major engines, not just one.
The arc only tightens from here: Google later announced an increased mobile friendly ranking boost, and Bing itself eventually extended its mobile push with AMP support for mobile web searches in 2018. This 2015 rollout is the moment mobile-friendliness stops being a Google-specific requirement.
First-order effects
- Webmasters and SEO teams that optimized only for Google's April update must now verify their pages against Bing's own mobile-friendly criteria, since the two engines' signals are not guaranteed to be identical.
- Sites already rebuilt for Google's algorithm get a free pass on much of the work, while laggards face ranking exposure in both engines simultaneously for the first time.
Second-order effects
- SEO tooling vendors and auditing services gain demand for cross-engine mobile checks, as 'is my site mobile-friendly' becomes a two-engine question rather than a Google-only one.
- With Bing matching Google's core ranking signal, Microsoft loses mobile-friendliness as a differentiator and pushes elsewhere — the same period's related coverage shows Bing steering users toward its own Edge browser instead of competing purely on result quality.
Third-order effects
- If both engines keep weighting mobile experience, the endpoint visible in the corpus is mobile-first indexing — Google completed exactly that switch in 2023, retiring its legacy desktop crawler — making the mobile version of a site the canonical one engines evaluate.
- Mobile-friendliness hardens from competitive advantage into table stakes, shifting SEO competition toward whatever signal each engine layers next on top of it.
The trend: Search engines are converging on mobile-first evaluation of the web, turning mobile-friendliness from a differentiator into a baseline requirement that each engine then builds new signals on top of.