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Featured · Development

Core Web Vitals still matter, just not for the reason you were told

Speed was never much of a ranking factor. It is a large conversion factor, and now it is a retrieval factor too — because slow, JavaScript-dependent pages are invisible to most AI crawlers.

20 May 2026 · 7 min read

Key takeaway

Core Web Vitals have only ever been a small direct ranking signal. Their real commercial value is conversion — faster pages convert measurably better — and, increasingly, retrieval: most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript, so content that only appears after client-side hydration is invisible to them regardless of how well the page scores for a human visitor.

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