Core Web Vitals are Google's three metrics measuring real-world user experience: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
2026 pass thresholds (mobile):
- LCP under 2.5s
- INP under 200ms
- CLS under 0.1
Sites passing all three at the 75th percentile rank higher in Google + get cited more often by AI search engines (ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Claude). Sites failing get progressively less visibility.
The 2024 change: INP replaced FID, raising the bar by measuring every interaction (not just the first). See our technical SEO reference architecture for the engineering patterns that hit the thresholds.