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Comment by youngtaff | Hacker News Reader

Lighthouse / PSI scores are irrelevant to search ranking.

Data from the Chrome UX Report (CrUX) is going to be used in results ranking as part of the page experience update - this comes from real-world usage of Chrome

GA affecting Lighthouse scores may be a good storyline for Simple Analytics (and there are plenty of reasons not to use GA) but you can still use GA and pass all the core web vitals

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Google may not be using Lighthouse to perform the tests, but it is understood that Google use performance metrics as an SEO factor.

It's understandable that Simple Analytics would use Lighthouse to measure performance and extrapolate from there. I'm not sure how else they could do the test — as presumably they don't have access to Google's data.

I don't think it's too far fetched to think that Google will somehow tweak CrUX numbers to counteract the performance drop caused by GA. For example, on a small percentage of users block GA and send the collected CrUX numbers with a special tag to the mothership, and then using only those when ranking sites.

Possibly, but what they care about really is "What experience will users have when they visit a site". The GA script loading time is totally part of that, so why discount it from the measurements?

Hahahaha.... takes deep breath... «… they care about users»? ROFL… Google doesn't, never has, never will. Google cares about money. Period. It's in their interest to rank sites which use GA above sites which use competing products.

Kind of depends on how compelling GA is to the overall organization.

GA makes some money, and maybe helps global tracking.

Otoh, if it's an easy way to get ranking, that's going to be abused. And parts of the org do seem to want fast pages to win, so if GA means slow pages, there's a conflict.

Experience of Chrome users when they visit a site.

The Chrome UX Report itself uses PSI, and all of its metrics are based on page performance, so I wouldn't say it's irrelevant.

This is kind of a snake pit. Google now has three different but related page performance initiatives.

1. Pagespeed insights 2. Web vitals, further sub divided into Core Web Vitals and just Web Vitals. 3. Lighthouse

They all work together or are sub components of the other. Even more, two of three Core Web Vitals (Cumulative Layout Shift and First Input Delay) are not really reliably measures in a typical lab environment like PSI and Lighthouse: they require actual user interaction with a page. They are essentially RUM (Real User Monitoring) metrics.

Other Web Vitals like Time to First Byte are much more deterministic.

> this comes from real-world usage of Chrome

Measured by what metric(s)? Core Web Vitals.

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