Google page experience update is now rolled out

Google confirmed that it completed the page experience update rollout today. This includes the updates to the Top Stories carousel on mobile search but the Google News app changes won’t be done for a week, say Google reps.

Google began rolling out the page experience update on June 15th and told us it would be completed by the end of August. It technically was not finished before the end of August and has about a week more to go, but it is essentially done.

The announcement. “The page experience rollout is complete now, including updates to Top Stories mobile carousel. Changes to Google News app have started to roll out as well and will be complete in a week or so,” Google announced on Twitter.

No huge ranking changes. As a reminder, you should not have seen huge ranking changes in Google Search for this release. This was a slow rollout and Google originally said do not expect drastic changes: “While this update is designed to highlight pages that offer great user experiences, page experience remains one of many factors our systems take into account… Given this, sites generally should not expect drastic changes,” said Google.

Do not confuse with core updates. Do not confuse the page experience update, that uses core web vitals as a signal, with core updates. They are unrelated and do not influence each other. In fact, the June 2021 core update just finished rolling out on June 12. The core updates are felt more in terms of ranking fluctuations by sites in Google Search than would this page experience update.

Why we care. Most of you have been waiting for this update to roll out for now over a year. It is now done rolling out. Again, do not expect big ranking changes from this rollout and do not confuse it with ranking changes due to the core update we had in June and the core update we are expecting in July.