Can Browser Extensions Impact Your Google Core Web Vitals Scores?

Mar 17, 2021 - 7:11 am 0 by

Google Mobile

Over the past week or so, there has been a lot of chatter in the SEO industry around the potential threat third-party browser extensions can have on your core web vitals scores. Specifically how it might impact your rankings in Google Search based on how a user who visited your site may have installed a plugin that impacts maybe the CLS score on your pages.

The truth is, this is not really a huge concern for a few reasons:

(1) Most people do not have browser extensions on their mobile browsers and these scores, at least how Google uses them for ranking, are mobile only. John Mueller from Google reiterated this point on this concern on Reddit when this topic came up, John said "Yeah, page experience is currently slated only for mobile search, and if lots of people have figured out how to install plugins on chrome on Android, I'd love to know the trick."

(2) Most users, and no, SEOs are not the average browser user, probably do not install browser extensions on their desktop browser (not that it impacts Google anyway).

(3) The Page Experience Update won't be a massive ranking change anyway.

This came up when Dave Sottimano tweeted and Addy Osmani from Google responded:

Here are the hat tips:

In any event - nothing to worry about - in my opinion.

Forum discussion at Twitter and Reddit.

 

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