Google Says Lighthouse Scores Do Not Affect Google Search

Google’s John Mueller, with a tad of annoyance, posted on Twitter that “lighthouse scores do not affect Google Search.” He then shares a tweet about people cloaking and cheating their lighthouse scores as a scam to trick Google.

Here is John’s tweet:

Lighthouse scores do not affect Google Search.

Doing this kind of user-agent cloaking is a terrible idea – you’re just deceiving yourself. It makes absolutely no sense, and prevents you from finding real issues. If you run across a plugin that does this, report it to the CMS. https://t.co/yCoaYduHU4

— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) August 26, 2021

John wrote, as you can see, “Doing this kind of user-agent cloaking is a terrible idea – you’re just deceiving yourself. It makes absolutely no sense, and prevents you from finding real issues. If you run across a plugin that does this, report it to the CMS.”

Colin Bendell, a Performance Engineering at Shopify wrote:

Code obfuscation is a strong smell that a dev is trying to hide something dishonest, and is likely hurting your business. Fire that team.

More examples of lighthouse UA sniffing that is actually making things slower: pic.twitter.com/G9VkN9ccOx

— Colin Bendell (@colinbendell) August 26, 2021

Google has often downplayed Lighthouse metrics for SEO over the years.

This thread on Twitter is super interesting, here are some responses that caught my eye:

Google is partly to blame for this IMO. They’ve created such hysteria with their CWV update that site owners are scrambling to get a perfect Lighthouse scores in order to stay relevant, and so far these shady “SEO” tools seem to be working…

— Miriam Schwab (@miriamschwab) August 29, 2021

Malte Ubl is a Googler:

Most SEOs don’t understand the lighthouse scores don’t directly relate to your page speed scores even prior to the page experience roll out.

— Kristine Schachinger (@schachin) August 26, 2021

So stop fooling yourself.

Forum discussion at Twitter.