Gary Illyes from Google said on Reddit he thinks it is unlikely that core web vitals "would ever become the primary factor for organic traffic." He said you shouldn't ignore it but Google and other search engines rank primarily based on "highest quality and most relevant results for users' queries," not necessarily what is in the core web vitals.
I've been saying this since Google announced the page experience update - which is not live yet. When it does go live, I doubt it would have significant play in the overall ranking algorithm. If you look at the signals already in there, like HTTPS, page speed, mobile friendly and so on - all of those are already ranking factors - but Google has said they are small or tiny factors.
Gary wrote in that thread:
Like any other search engine, Google works hard to surface the highest quality and most relevant results for users' queries. CWV has nothing to do with either of those, not even remotely, so it's extremely unlikely that CWV would ever become "the primary factor for Organic Traffic".That's not to say you can ignore CWV, though.
Then someone suggested that this CWV - core web vitals - was live. Nope, Gary confirmed it is not live yet. He said "CWV is not a ranking signal, at least not yet. Whatever you're seeing, it's highly unlikely to be related to CWV."
This should come as no surprise to most of you. Yes, you want your site to be a great user experience but if your site has the most relevant content for a query, Google will still rank your site highly, even if you do not perform too well with those core web vital signals.
Gary explained:
we announced it will become *a* ranking factor, that's known. i merely ruled out the possibility of it becoming *the* primary ranking factor. whatever it will be eventually in-between is not known and I'm not going to speculate about it.
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) September 7, 2020
Forum discussion at Reddit.
