Google talks about grouping similar URLs for Core Web Vitals Scores

During the Google offline hours’ hangout, the question came up about similar kinds of pages. It includes category pages, which had the aggregated scores with core web vitals. John Muller answered about grouping similar URLs.

A person asked if the similar pages were having the grouping or scoring together or not. The reason why this matters is, some of the sections might not receive enough visits from Chrome users. Hence, it doesn’t provide the data back to Google for its core web vitals scorings.

The question asked if John does group the URLs by type or not. They have noticed something very similar that category pages do have enough Chrome views to offer perfect data. But they get the messages, saying these are similar pages,

Mueller’s answers were fast. He accepted doing this. They do it with the Chrome User Experience Report data. It is the field of real-world data where they try to recognize when there are enough pages that are similar and easy to group together.

Next, he talks about the scoring of these groups. According to him, it could be something where all the category pages are in one group. They say these pages perform similarly. Thus, if they find a new URL that is a part of this group, they do not need to have data for that new URL. They can rely on grouping similar URLs overall.

This confirms that if Google does not have the core web vitals data for the individual pages that Google will assign the overall score for the group. Muller also discussed how this could create anomalies in the Google Search Console Report.

He thinks that it throws things a little bit in the sense of one group, essentially for a site. But it can contain thousands of URLs. So in this report in the Search Console, he thinks that one must report that as thousands of URLs are having the same problem. However, not seeing any data in one report and seeing a lot of data in other reports can be weird.

Google groups URLs together to score something. Aggregating the scores can explain why some of the publishers and SEOs might not see the fixes in the report of Core Web Vitals. The scores for these fixed sections can be aggregated with the scores of the crawled and scored sections.