A small but genuinely useful change has arrived in Google Search Console: the performance report's device filter now lets you select more than one device type at a time. Search Engine Roundtable reported on November 4, 2026 that the report has rolled out the ability to select multiple device types, covering desktop, mobile, and tablet. It is the kind of quiet interface fix that changes how SEOs actually work with the data, because comparing devices no longer means running the same report three times.
The update came to light the way many Search Console changes do: an SEO noticed something different and asked about it. Dan Richardson asked on X whether the radio buttons were new, and Barry Schwartz confirmed the multi-select option in his own accounts. Google has not published a formal announcement for the change, which fits the pattern for Search Console interface updates. They tend to roll out quietly, get spotted by practitioners, and only later appear in help documentation.
The timing is notable because Google made a related change about a month earlier, adding multi-select options for countries and devices in the performance report's filter set. The device filter reaching multi-select completes that work. SEOs can now combine filters more freely, for example looking at mobile and tablet together against desktop, or isolating a single device without losing the ability to compare it with another in the same view.
Device segmentation is where many real SEO problems first show up. A site can look healthy in aggregate while mobile traffic quietly falls, because desktop holds the total up. A sudden drop in clicks that looks like a ranking loss is often a device-specific problem: a broken mobile template, a slow mobile experience, or a page that renders badly on phones. With multi-select, an SEO can put mobile and desktop side by side in one report and see the gap immediately, instead of exporting and comparing separate views.
The change also helps with AI search analysis. AI Overviews and AI Mode behave differently across devices, and their effect on clicks is not uniform. Being able to filter performance by device combinations makes it easier to separate a genuine ranking change from a change in how much screen space AI answers occupy on phones versus desktops. That distinction matters more every month, as AI features take different amounts of room on different screens.
For link builders, the practical use is in reporting. When a campaign earns links to a page, the traffic effect often shows up first on one device, usually mobile, where most discovery happens. A multi-select filter makes that visible in a single screenshot for a client report, without a spreadsheet in between.
Open any property in Search Console, go to the performance report, and open the device filter. If the multi-select option is available in your account, test a comparison you could not easily run before: mobile plus tablet against desktop for your most important pages over the last 28 days. Look for pages where one device is falling while the others hold steady, and treat those as technical leads before treating them as content problems.
Also check whether the change has reached all your properties. Search Console rollouts can be uneven, and a feature visible in one account may not yet appear in another. If it is missing, it is a rollout timing issue rather than an account problem, and it should arrive on its own.
Combine the device filter with the filters you already use. Pair a device comparison with a query filter to see whether a keyword's mobile performance differs from its desktop performance, or pair it with a page filter to check whether a template change helped phones and hurt tablets. The value of multi-select is not the control itself but the comparisons it unlocks, and the most useful ones are the ones that cross device with page or query. Save the combinations that reveal real gaps as your standard views, and revisit them monthly, because device behaviour drifts as phones, browsers, and AI features change.
Sources: Search Engine Roundtable, November 4, 2026.
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