Here is yet another update on when Google will really be killing off the AJAX crawling scheme from 2009. Google announced its death in 2015 but then gave it a date of Q2 of 2018 last year and continued to tell us it is on the chopping block.

It is not dead yet, Google still will crawl pages with ?_escaped_fragment_= URLs but John Mueller from Google said he’d expect it to go away sooner rather than later in their estimate of Q2 2018, which is now. The issue is, it doesn’t seem Google killed it off yet.

While Gary Illyes from Google said on Twitter that it is no longer working. John Mueller didn’t say that on Twitter – he said it is coming.

Here is how Gary responded: