Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are Google's three measures of how a page feels to use: loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability.
Core Web Vitals are three measures Google uses to describe how a page feels to use: how fast the main content loads, how quickly the page reacts when someone taps or clicks, and how much the layout jumps around while it loads. Google uses them as part of how it judges page experience in search.
For marketers, they put numbers on something visitors notice straight away. A page that's slow to show its main photo or jumps as ads load loses people, wherever they came from.
The three measures
Each one has a published threshold for good, set out on Google's Web Vitals page:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures loading. Good is 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures responsiveness. Good is 200 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability. Good is 0.1 or less.
Google looks at the 75th percentile of real visits, on phones and computers separately. So a page passes only when at least three out of four real visits meet the threshold. How it loads on your office connection doesn't decide it.
How much they matter for rankings
Google says in its Core Web Vitals guide that good scores, along with the rest of page experience, line up with what its ranking systems try to reward. It doesn't say how much weight they carry. The safer reason to care is the visitors: they're the ones who wait.
For example, Kestrel Roasters' product pages have an LCP of 4.8 seconds on phones because the hero image is a large file. Compressing it and loading it first brings LCP down to 2.1 seconds, and the share of phone visitors who leave straight away drops.
Core Web Vitals and AI search
AI platforms don't publish a speed threshold. But the people they send to your site expect the page to pick up where the answer left off, and a slow page loses them fast. Heavy pages can also be harder for crawlers to fetch in full.
In AnswerOrbit
Open a page in the Pages tab of Website to see its health on a phone, from how quickly its main content shows to how much it weighs, banded Good, Needs work or Poor by Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds. Page checks include whether a page is fast on phones. See Website and AI traffic and Recommendations.