Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are three measures from Google of how a page feels to real visitors. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) checks how fast the main content loads. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) checks how quickly the page reacts to a tap or click. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) checks how much the layout jumps around while it loads.
Source: Google Search Central, Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results (updated December 10, 2025), checked October 29, 2026
What Core Web Vitals means for your business
Google's targets for a good score: the main content shows within 2.5 seconds (LCP), the page responds to a tap in under 200 milliseconds (INP), and the layout shift score stays under 0.1 (CLS). Chrome's web.dev guide says to judge each one at the 75th percentile of page loads, so three in four visits should hit the target, with phones and computers counted separately. INP took over from an older measure, First Input Delay, in 2024.
Google says its ranking systems use Core Web Vitals, and also that good scores don't guarantee a top spot.
Each measure tends to fail for its own reason. Chrome's web.dev guides say a slow LCP often comes from the main image or text block starting to load late. A poor INP often comes from long tasks, usually JavaScript, that keep the page busy when someone taps. A poor CLS most often comes from images, ads and embeds without a set size, and from web fonts. We'd match each red result in your report to one of those before touching anything else.
If your Core Web Vitals report shows pages in red and you're not sure what's causing it, we'd check the technical side of your site, starting with the pages buyers use most.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview gave the right three targets and cited Google's page, web.dev, Cloudflare, SEO tool blogs and YouTube. ChatGPT gave the same targets in a table, linked only to Google's own testing tools and cited no source for the definition.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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