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Comment by shadowfaxRodeo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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