Google search: More details on the page experience update

Last November Google announced that the page experience ranking signal will go live on Google Search this year, in what they’re calling the “page experience update”. To help publishers and site owners improve their page experience and prepare, Google announced a few key updates:

Gradual rollout starting in mid-June this year

Google will begin using page experience as part of its ranking systems beginning in mid-June 2021. However, page experience won’t play its full role as part of those systems until the end of August.

As we have said before, while this update is designed to highlight pages that offer great user experiences, page experience remains one of many factors Google systems take into account. Given this, sites generally should not expect drastic changes. In addition, because they’re doing this as a gradual rollout, Google will be able to monitor for any unexpected or unintended issues.

This adjusted roll-out schedule will help you continue to make refinements to your website with page experience in mind.

Details on what will be included in the update

As previously announced, the page experience update will consider several page experience signals, including the three Core Web Vitals metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS (as well as Chrome’s recent fix to CLS). In addition, the Top Stories carousel feature on Google Search will be updated to include all news content, as long as it meets the Google News policies. This means that using the AMP format is no longer required and that any page, irrespective of its Core Web Vitals score or page experience status, will be eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel.

Google is also bringing similar updates to the Google News app, a key destination for users around the world to get a comprehensive view of the important news of the day. As part of the page experience update, Google is expanding the usage of non-AMP content to power the core experience on news.google.com and in the Google News mobile apps.

Additionally, Google will no longer show the AMP badge icon to indicate AMP content. You can expect this change to come to Google products as the page experience update begins to roll out in mid-June.

A new Page Experience report in Search Console

To provide you with more actionable insights, Google is introducing the Page Experience report. This report combines the existing Core Web Vitals report with other components of the page experience signals, such as HTTPS security, absence of intrusive interstitials, safe browsing status, and mobile friendliness.

The Page Experience report offers valuable metrics, such as the percentage of URLs with good page experience and search impressions over time, enabling you to quickly evaluate performance. You can also dig into the components of page experience signal to gain additional insights on opportunities for improvement.

In addition to launching the Page Experience report, Google also updated the Search Performance report to allow you to filter pages with good page experience, which helps you keep track of how these pages compare to other pages on the same site.