Google hopeful the mobile-first index will launch by year’s end But Gary Illyes says it might not go live until 2018.

In November 2016, Google launched their mobile-first index experiment and hoped to do enough testing to launch it sometime in the near future. Well, it seems this mobile-first index has proven to be a challenge for Google, and they may not even launch it this year.

At the Next10x Conference in Boston yesterday, Gary Illyes from Google said that while the team is hopeful that they will launch the mobile-first index by the end of the year, he feels that it is unlikely.

We asked Gary to confirm, and he told us that he did indeed say that at the event. He said the team working on the mobile-first index at Google “would like to launch by end of the year,” but Gary added he thinks “that’s unlikely to happen, at least fully.”

So if you are anxious about the mobile-first index going live with Google, there’s no need to panic right now — you have some time to get ready.