Core Web Vitals
Also known as: CWV
Google's page-experience signals — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), Interaction to Next Paint (INP). Directly affect rank in Google surfaces including Gemini + AI Overviews.
Core Web Vitals are Google's standardized measures of page-experience quality: LCP (largest content element paint time, <2.5s target), CLS (visual stability, <0.1 target), INP (interactivity latency, <200ms target).
For traditional Google Search, Core Web Vitals are one ranking signal among many. For Gemini + AI Overviews + Google Search's agentic surfaces, Core Web Vitals are meaningfully more weighted. A slow product page loses rank across the whole Google ecosystem simultaneously.
Common fixes: image optimization (WebP/AVIF), font loading strategy (font-display: swap; preload critical fonts), third-party script deferral, server-side rendering, edge caching.
If you're doing site-technical health work as part of AI Search Visibility optimization, Core Web Vitals is the first checklist. Green tier on all three is table stakes for Gemini rank.
See also