Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are Google's set of user-experience metrics for loading, interactivity, and visual stability, a measurable proxy for the page speed and quality that support AI visibility.
Also known as: CWV
Core Web Vitals are Google's headline page-experience metrics. They quantify three things a visitor feels: loading speed (Largest Contentful Paint), visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift), and responsiveness to input — giving a standardized read on whether a page is fast and pleasant to use.
For AEO they matter as part of the access pillar. Fast, stable pages are crawled more thoroughly, frustrate users less, and correlate with stronger visibility, while slow or janky pages create friction for people and machines alike. They're not a magic ranking lever on their own, but they're a concrete, measurable target — and improving them usually means the same fixes (lighter pages, server rendering) that also make your content more reliably readable.
Example. A page that loads its main content fast, doesn't shift around as it loads, and responds instantly to taps passes Core Web Vitals — the kind of solid technical foundation that keeps you crawlable and competitive.
Relevant pillar
Related terms
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)Largest Contentful Paint measures how long it takes for the biggest piece of content to render, a Core Web Vital that captures how quickly a page feels loaded.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much a page's content unexpectedly moves around as it loads, a Core Web Vital capturing visual stability.
- Time to First Byte (TTFB)Time to First Byte measures how long after a request the server sends the first byte of the response, an early speed signal that affects both crawl efficiency and how fast a page can load.