Google’s John Mueller reiterated what Google has been saying for some time around Core Web Vitals and the specific metrics within the page experience system. In short, if you fix INP issues, John Muller said, don’t “expect it to visibly change search ranking.”
In July, Google began sending out scary INP core web vital warnings to users. That email notice came a few weeks after Google created the INP report in Google Search Console. As a reminder, INP, Interaction to Next, is replacing FID, First Input Delay, in March 2024.
In any event, John Mueller said at the 19:09 mark in the SEO office hours video, “While improving INP can definitely help user experience, I wouldn’t expect it to visibly change search ranking.”
As I said before, INP is a metric that aims to represent a page’s overall interaction latency by selecting one of the single longest interactions that occur when a user visits a page. For pages with less than 50 interactions in total, INP is the interaction with the worst latency. For pages with many interactions, INP is most often the 98th percentile of interaction latency.
More on INP can be found here and how to optimize for it can be found here.
Just keep in mind, page experience is not a system, but rather a good page experience is part of the overall core ranking system. “Good stats within the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console or third-party Core Web Vitals reports don’t guarantee good rankings,” Splitt wrote.
Here is the video embed at that time:
Forum discussion at Twitter.
