Core Web Vitals Are a Google Tax

In 2020, Google announced that Core Web Vitals would become a ranking factor, and the SEO industry, in a display of collective hysteria that would have made a medieval flagellant procession look restrained, promptly lost its mind.

LCP! FID! CLS! INP! Everyone scrambled to optimize for metrics that most people had never heard of, which created a beautiful cascade of activity where agencies started selling CWV audits to clients who didn't know what CWV stood for, tools launched CWV dashboards that nobody knew how to interpret, and conference speakers discovered they could fill entire sessions talking about CWV optimization to audiences who nodded along pretending they understood what was happening.

And it barely matters.

The Dirty Secret

Search any competitive keyword, look at the top 10 results, and then check their Core Web Vitals scores, and what you'll find is a mess of red scores and yellow scores and failing CLS and slow LCP, and yet somehow, mysteriously, inexplicably, they're all ranking just fine, which is the kind of observation that should make you question whether you've been optimizing for the right things this whole time.

Because content relevance still trumps everything, and a slow page that perfectly answers the query will beat a fast page that doesn't, which is something Google knows perfectly well since they've said as much when they called CWV a "tiebreaker" signal, which is corporate speak for "it almost never matters but we'd like you to think it does."

Who Benefits?

So why did Google make such a big deal about it? The answer, as usual when dealing with corporations that have achieved monopoly-adjacent status, is to follow the money.

Google sells cloud hosting, which means faster sites need more infrastructure and more CDN and more optimization, all of which requires more spending on services that Google happens to offer, in what is surely a complete coincidence that benefits their bottom line.

Google's tools dominate the measurement landscape - PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, Search Console, Chrome DevTools - which means you literally cannot optimize for CWV without using Google products, thereby deepening your dependency on their ecosystem in ways that would make a drug dealer envious of the business model.

Google's Chrome collects the data, since Real User Metrics come from Chrome browsers, which means that by making CWV important, Google convinced the entire industry to install more tracking that feeds more data back to Google, which they can then use to sell more ads and improve more products, and the whole thing is so elegantly self-serving that you almost have to admire it.

The Manufactured Complexity

Web performance used to be simple - don't be slow, and if your page loads in a reasonable time, you're fine - but now you need to optimize for Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and First Input Delay (FID), except wait, they changed that to Interaction to Next Paint (INP), plus Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and Time to First Byte (TTFB) and First Contentful Paint (FCP), and each metric has its own thresholds and requires its own optimizations and has its own edge cases and caveats, and if you feel like you need a PhD just to make a website load, well, that's rather the point.

This complexity creates demand for specialists, which creates demand for tools, which creates demand for consulting, which creates an entire economy built around manufactured problems that didn't exist until someone decided they should exist, and now we all pretend they're essential because admitting otherwise would collapse a lot of careers.

What Actually Matters

Here's the performance advice that actually moves needles, which I'm providing for free even though I could probably charge you for a CWV audit instead:

Don't be egregiously slow, which means if your pages take 10+ seconds to load, you should fix that, but obsessing over whether you've shaved your load time from 2.5 seconds to 2.3 seconds is the kind of activity that makes you feel productive while accomplishing nothing, because Google does not care about that 200 milliseconds and neither do your users.

Don't break the experience, by which I mean if your ads cause your page to jump around like it's having a seizure, users will leave, and you should fix layout shift because it's annoying to actual humans, not because some metric told you to.

Prioritize content over performance theater, because one hour spent improving your content will beat ten hours spent optimizing CWV scores, which is also true for most technical SEO, but nobody wants to hear that because it implies they've been wasting their time.

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.