How user experience is measured by Google?
That’s super tricky. On the one hand, we don’t have a pure user experience ranking factor kind of thing, but rather we have individual things that kind of map into user experience, and the two parts that thought someone would call out are, and on the other hand, we have the page layout algorithm. Not sure what the official name is, but essentially, the algorithm where we try to recognize when there is significant unique content above the fold on a web page, which maps into the user experience in terms of the page when a user clicks on it from the search results, is it just filled with ads, or is there actually content there? And that’s something google cares about. That’s something that kind of maps as a ranking factor and also goes into usability a bit.
The other aspect is everything around Core Web Vitals, which is coming up, next month or so? Where google takes into account things like speed, usability with the cumulative layout shift, first input delay as a measure for how quickly a page is responsive, and take that into account with regards to ranking. So those are the primary aspects that would fall into user experience as a ranking factor. But it’s tricky because it’s not that we have user experience as a ranking factor. It’s just a little bit of overlap.
A similar question was asked to John Mueller in Google Office Hours Look What John said:
