Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google uses to measure user experience on a webpage, directly impacting your search ranking as of December 2025. Google’s ranking system now prioritises pages that provide a fast, smooth and visually stable experience, and penalises those that don’t – this is often referred to as ‘punishment’, though Google frames it as rewarding good experiences.
Currently, the three Core Web Vitals are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). These are measured using real-user data collected through Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) and are reported in Google Search Console. In December 2025, Google’s systems analyse this data to determine a page’s overall health score. Australian businesses using platforms like Siteimprove or Semrush can integrate CrUX data directly into their reporting, allowing them to monitor these metrics. Google has announced that in 2027, a further refinement of these signals will be introduced, potentially incorporating additional user-centric metrics. The thresholds for ‘good’ performance are LCP under 2.5 seconds, FID under 100 milliseconds, and CLS under 0.1. Sites consistently failing to meet these thresholds may see reduced visibility in search results.
Essentially, Core Web Vitals function as a quantifiable measure of page quality, influencing how Google ranks websites based on actual user experience data.
