Glossary
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are Google's three user-experience metrics — Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift — used as a ranking signal in search.
Core Web Vitals are three measurable metrics Google uses to score the user experience of a webpage:
• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — when the largest visible element renders. Good: ≤2.5s.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — how responsive the page is to user input. Good: ≤200ms.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — how much the layout jumps around as it loads. Good: ≤0.1.
Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor in Google's page-experience signals. Sites that fail Core Web Vitals can lose rankings to faster competitors even when content quality is identical.
Example
A site with a 4-second LCP from a heavy hero video can lose top-3 rankings to a competitor whose LCP is 1.2s — same content, different infrastructure.