Dwell time
Dwell time is how long someone stays on a page they clicked from search results before going back to the results.
Dwell time is how long someone spends on a page they opened from a search result before they head back to the results. Click a result, read for two minutes, press back: that's two minutes of dwell time.
SEO people talk about it because it hints at whether a page answered the question. A quick return suggests it didn't. A long stay, or no return at all, suggests it did.
Dwell time, time on page and bounce rate
They're easy to mix up. Dwell time only counts visits that start on a search results page and end with a return to it. Time on page covers any visit, however someone arrived. Bounce rate is the share of visits that didn't go any further than the first page, or, in Google Analytics 4, the share of visits that weren't engaged.
You can't see dwell time in your analytics. Search engines don't report it, and your site doesn't know when someone goes back to the results. The closest you can get is to watch time spent and engagement on pages that get most of their visits from search.
What a short dwell time tells you
For example, Fernhill Coffee's page on grind sizes gets lots of search visits, but people leave after a few seconds. The page opens with a long story about the company before it reaches the chart people came for. Moving the chart to the top keeps people on the page.
Dwell time and AI answers
When an AI assistant answers a question in full, there's often no click at all. The person reads the answer and moves on. The visits AI assistants do send tend to come from people who want more than the answer gave them, so the page they land on has to pick up where the answer left off.
In AnswerOrbit
The AI traffic tab in Website shows the visits AI assistants send you, from Google Analytics. If you've set up key events, you'll see an engagement rate, where a visit counts as engaged when it lasted over 10 seconds, saw two pages or had a key event. See Website and AI traffic.