Definitions
The terms on this page, explained
Plain definitions of the concepts this service works with — so you can evaluate the work rather than take the vocabulary on trust.
- Crawl budget
- How much crawling Google is willing to do on your site. Wasted on faceted and parameter URLs, it stops reaching the pages that earn revenue.
- Field data
- Real-user performance measurements from the Chrome User Experience Report, at the 75th percentile over a rolling 28 days. This is what Google uses for the ranking signal — not Lighthouse.
- Lab data
- A single simulated page load, as produced by Lighthouse. A debugging tool, not a ranking input, and routinely mistaken for one.
- INP
- Interaction to Next Paint. Measures how quickly the page responds to real clicks, taps and key presses. Harder to pass than the metric it replaced, because it measures the whole interaction.
- Rendering
- The step where Google executes JavaScript to see the final page. Content that only exists after execution can be missed entirely, which is invisible in your CMS and obvious in the index.