4 min read
App indexing in Google: what impact does it have on brands and businesses?
The revolution continues. After Android, it’s iOS’s turn. According to Google, the content of Apple’s apps is going to be indexed and will appear on iPhone and iPad. For now, only a handful of iOS apps have been indexed as partners. But Google promises to expand the pool of eligible apps as fast as it can.
Picture this: you’re sitting in your living room and you’re searching Google for your favorite recipe. From now on, Google will surface a deep link straight from the indexing of an iOS app in its results. That takes you directly to a page inside the app, downloading it first if you don’t already have it.
Is your app in the Google index? DEPRECATED - YouTube
Tap to unmute
Is your app in the Google index? DEPRECATED Google for Developers
Google for Developers2.66M subscribers
App indexing in Google: what’s changing?
For businesses, the stakes are considerable. According to a study by ComScore, mobile now accounts for more than 60% of web traffic. And the numbers keep climbing.
This move means businesses will have to catch up. Especially in e-commerce, and travel and real estate in particular, where searches start in the mobile browser and where the goal is to move users over to the app for a better experience.
Deep linking — a way to open an app directly on a given piece of content, with no intermediate step — delivers a lower bounce rate by landing the user on the right page. App results with keywords chosen well for each page also get more prominence from Google.
“On the face of it, having an indexed app will be treated as “mobile friendly” by Google, so it’s a positive for SEO,” explains Alexandre Jubien, mobile strategist at ThinkMobile and a speaker on App Indexing at SMX Paris 2015, reached by Semji. “App content will also be suggested by Google through autocomplete.”
Deep linking also increases the number of app installs and drives user re-engagement. An app can stand out in Google’s results with deep linking, too. It can lift its CTR (click-through rate) by being more visible on Google.
Example of an app’s visibility in Google’s results
To do that, the <link> tag and its rel=“alternate” attribute let you insert code into the <head></head> section of the site
App indexing in Google: Google is helping developers
The financial stakes are high. Rolling deep linking out across every app creates more opportunities to sell advertising, and therefore to grow revenue. Facebook, with AppLinks, and Twitter, with App Cards, had already joined the deep linking battle. Through it, these social networks let users navigate straight into an app by clicking on an ad, for example. “You can only do retargeting, meaning re-engaging someone, if deep linking has been implemented in the app,” warns Alexandre Jubien
To get an iOS app into Google’s index, the Mountain View firm asks developers to follow the instructions, translated into French. For developers, the job is to deep link the existing app, that is, to add a deep link to a page of the app. That’s easier to pull off when the app was built with the ability to do deep linking from the start. Once the first technical hurdles are cleared, the complexity sits with tracking for analytics.
App indexing in Google: what impact on a company’s brand image?
By using app indexing, a company’s brand image stands to benefit, with content that is genuinely user friendly. “Thanks to app indexing, users will discover the app and come back to it more easily,” says Alexandre Jubien.
But app indexing also raises questions. Which content should you deep link in the app, for instance? These are the kinds of questions that surface gradually.
In the meantime, Google can hope to serve more “user friendly” content, and so collect more advertising receipts and sponsored revenue, which make up its primary source of income.
See it on your own brand
Find out where AI engines mention you
Semji tracks which prompts surface your brand across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and DeepSeek — then shows you the content to write to close the gaps.
ChatGPTGoogle AI OverviewsPerplexityGeminiClaudeDeepSeek
By
Semji
