Google Delays Page Experience Ranking Signal Rollout until June 2021, Adds New Report to Search Console

Google announced this week that it will be delaying the rollout of the new page experience ranking signal to mid-June 2021. Page experience will be included along with existing search signals like mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines. The rollout, previously planned to begin in May, will be gradual and page experience will not be in full force as a ranking signal until August.

In the meantime, Google has been elaborating on how page experience is evaluated and has published an FAQ page with common questions they have been answering:

If I built AMP pages, do they meet the recommended thresholds?

Can a site meet the recommended thresholds without using AMP?

Is there a difference between desktop and mobile ranking?

Google also announced a new Page Experience report in the Search Console that displays the percentage of URLs with good page experience and search impressions over time. Currently, page experience only applies to mobile search. Good URLs refers to the percentage of mobile URLs with both Good status in Core Web Vitals and no mobile usability issues according to the Mobile Usability report.

Google News will also be getting some important AMP-related updates during the rollout, with the removal of the AMP badge icon and the inclusion of non-AMP content in the mobile apps:

As part of the page experience update, we’re expanding the usage of non-AMP content to power the core experience on news.google.com and in the Google News mobile apps.

Additionally, we will no longer show the AMP badge icon to indicate AMP content. You can expect this change to come to our products as the page experience update begins to roll out in mid-June.

Non-AMP pages will also be eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel as another planned part of this update.

Google Search has been updated to include support for signed exchanges (SXG) on all pages, previously only available on AMP-generated pages. This allows for pre-fetching resources, such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, or font, in order to render pages faster. Web.dev has a guide and tools for monitoring and debugging SXG.