The Mobile Friendly standard

Baidu’s mobile-friendly requirements are published as concrete criteria rather than a general principle, and they are enforced through the landing-page experience standard and the algorithms built on it.

The measurable requirements

• Loading: first-screen content within 1 second.
• Content share: main content occupying more than 50% of the first screen, positioned centrally.
• Typography: body text at 10pt or larger, line-height to font-size ratio above 1.4.
• Separation: clear spacing or a divider between main content and any advertising or recommendation block.
• Controls: an expand-full-text control at most once, never on the first screen, always labelled and functional.
• Device fit: correct rendering across handsets, with system UI not obscuring content.

What is prohibited outright

Floating, pop-up and screen-covering advertising in any position and at any size; advertising resembling page content or controls; and any requirement to register, log in or install an app in order to read content or use a function.

How this differs from Google’s equivalent

Google’s mobile-friendly test asks whether a page is usable on a phone — viewport, tap targets, text size. Baidu asks the same questions and then adds a quality of experience layer with numbers: how much of the screen the content occupies, how quickly it appears, how far advertising must be from a control. Passing a Google mobile-friendly test says nothing about whether a page meets this standard.

How to audit against it

1. Load the page on a real phone from a search result, on a normal connection.
2. Screenshot the first screen and measure what proportion is main content.
3. Check body text size and line height in the rendered CSS.
4. Scroll for floating elements, and interact to trigger overlays.
5. Attempt to read everything and use every function without logging in.

Five checks, ten minutes, and the result is a pass or a fail against published criteria rather than an opinion.