Google is simplifying Search Console reports so that users can focus on issues that affect how their website appears in search results.
The upcoming changes will affect the ‘warning’ label for URLs and items. There is some disagreement over whether this status indicates that a page or item cannot be found on Google.
Top-level items will be labeled as valid or invalid to avoid confusion. ‘Valid’ refers to pages or items that do not have critical issues, while ‘invalid’ refers to pages or items that do.
Individual issues are still classified as error, warning, or good, and this is communicated via color and icon rather than a text label.
Google summarizes how this will benefit Search Console users in a blog post:
“We believe that this new grouping will help you prioritize your fixes by making it easier to see which issues affect your site’s appearance on Google.” Google said.
It is said that this update has an impact on the following reports; Core Web Vitals (the categories Poor/Needs Improvement/Good are retained, while pages are divided into good and not-so-good tables), mobile Usability (there are two categories: ‘Not usable’ and ‘Usable.’
Also in the AMP report that warning labels have been replaced by ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ labels, then rich outcome reports (new labels will be applied to Events, Fact checks, Logos, and other report types), URL Inspection (URL is on Google, URL is on Google but has issues or URL is not on Google).
Since this update is being rolled out gradually over the next few months, users may not notice any changes today and this is merely a reporting modification in Search Console. Nothing has changed in terms of how users’ websites are crawled, indexed, or served in search results.