Hey Web Whip Team,

Thanks for reading & responding. Google will indeed penalize slow websites, just as they have been since 2018 for mobile search results.

In my research, some authors used the analogy of a carrot vs. a stick -- Google says they'll provide a boost (carrot) to websites meeting the Core Web Vitals instead of penalizing the others (stick). The effect will be the same, though -- websites that take longer than 3 seconds to load will be at a disadvantage.

Of course quality & relevance will remain the top factors in Google search, and I anticipate Medium (a very slow website) to continue outranking high-performance websites for a long time. Fundamentally, Google search is based on PageRank.

The current round of changes will indeed be a "minor factor with a small effect," as you put it -- and it would be nonsensical to think otherwise. In what world would it help Google's business to give up on its market-dominating search algorithm that focuses on relevance and quality in favor of one that focuses on a small part of user experience (web performance)?

Ultimately, though, user experience *is* a part of quality -- as Google doesn't want users to bounce (immediately leave) from the pages they find through search. Pretending like web performance doesn't matter because it's "only a minor factor" in Google's search ranking (as it has been for 3+ years already on mobile devices) is misleading and insulting to your customers. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!