Core Web Vitals Are a Google Tax
Google convinced the entire web industry to optimize for metrics that barely matter. Meanwhile, slow sites with great content still outrank fast empty ones.
In 2020, Google announced Core Web Vitals would become a ranking factor. The SEO industry lost its mind.
LCP! FID! CLS! INP! Everyone scrambled to optimize for metrics most people had never heard of. Agencies sold CWV audits. Tools launched CWV dashboards. Conference talks about CWV optimization everywhere.
And it barely matters.
The Dirty Secret
Search any competitive keyword. Look at the top 10 results. Check their Core Web Vitals scores.
You'll find a mess. Red scores. Yellow scores. Failing CLS. Slow LCP. And they're all ranking just fine.
Because content relevance still trumps everything. A slow page that perfectly answers the query will beat a fast page that doesn't.
Google knows this. They've said as much - CWV is a "tiebreaker" signal. Translation: it almost never matters.
Who Benefits?
So why did Google make such a big deal about it?
Google sells cloud hosting. Faster sites need more infrastructure. More CDN. More optimization. More spending.
Google's tools dominate. PageSpeed Insights. Lighthouse. Search Console. Chrome DevTools. You can't optimize for CWV without using Google products.
Google's Chrome collects the data. Real User Metrics come from Chrome. By making CWV important, Google gets the industry to install more tracking, feeding more data back to Google.
The entire CWV push benefits Google's ecosystem. Convenient.
The Manufactured Complexity
Web performance used to be simple: don't be slow. If your page loads in a reasonable time, you're fine.
Now you need to optimize for:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). First Input Delay (FID) - no wait, now it's Interaction to Next Paint (INP). Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Time to First Byte (TTFB). First Contentful Paint (FCP).
Each metric has thresholds. Each requires different optimizations. Each has edge cases and caveats.
This complexity creates demand for specialists. Which creates demand for tools. Which creates demand for consulting. An entire economy around manufactured problems.
What Actually Matters
Here's the performance advice that actually moves needles:
Don't be egregiously slow. If your pages take 10+ seconds to load, fix that. But optimizing from 2.5 seconds to 2.3 seconds won't change your rankings.
Don't break the experience. If ads cause your page to jump around, users will leave. Fix layout shift because it's annoying, not because of a metric.
Prioritize content over performance theater. One hour spent improving your content will beat ten hours optimizing CWV scores. (Same goes for most technical SEO.)
Core Web Vitals is Google convincing you to pay a tax for something that barely affects rankings. Don't fall for it.
Make your site not-slow. Then forget about CWV and focus on what actually matters: being useful.