Google’s John Mueller said trying to provide a good user experience but not succeeding will not result in any ranking benefit in Google Search. John said during office hours at the 9:29 minute mark, “What matters for Google is not that a website is attempting to give users a good page experience but rather if it’s actually giving users a good page experience.”

Having good intentions and working on page experience might be a good thing, but it doesn’t mean that Google cares. Google looks at the output, the results, not what you are trying to do but rather what you have done.

Keep in mind, this all should be looked at with a grain of salt. Page experience, core web vitals, are a small ranking factor that is likely not to move the needle much with your actual rankings in Google Search.

Here is the video embed:

The question was “Does Google treat link prefetch, pre-render, DNS resolve, etc, tags as a signal that the website is attempting to give its users a good user experience?”

John responded saying, “So when these things are used correctly so that your users benefit from a better experience, then this will be reflected in real user metrics for the Core Web Vitals and as such be considered in search an well.

What matters for Google is not that a website is attempting to give users a good page experience bur rather, if it’s actually giving users a good page experience.

Make sure that what you implement is functional.”

Forum discussion at Twitter.