Google's John Mueller said that he does not believe that the new content-visibility CSS that modern Chrome browsers support won't impact Google Search. It may impact the speed of your pages, that can impact your core web vitals but outside of that, it should have no significant impact on rankings.
This is despite the Chrome team saying the the new CSS property boosts your rendering performance but still, it should not impact more than your CRuX data, at best. Baruch Labunski asked about if the new Chrome content visibility CSS property has any impact on Google Search and rankings. John Mueller of Google basically said no, not really. It may impact the CRuX data but outside of that, Google doesn’t really get impacted much by it.
Baruch asked at the 6:58 mark into this past Friday's video. He asked "I want to know again not from a ranking factor perspective what is going to happen with the new CSS property that you guys just recently integrated to Chrome browser, so the new CSS property that I can implement to render content better."
Like John, when I was listening to this, I was not sure what Baruch was talking about and John said "I don't know which one you mean." Then Baruch explained it was the content visibility property.
John said "I doubt we do anything with it in search."
Baruch added "because it's it's just basically it's you know it's all about improving load time and so on. So I just wanted to know moving forward how important it's going to be to implement it into your site because a lot of developers are having issues. And SEOs they work together they're they're having a lot of issues with CSS and you know javascript those are the the two main issues."
John responded "yeah, I don't think we would do anything special with like new CSS properties or new HTML tags things like that in search. There are two places where it could come into play on the one hand when we render the pages because we use a modern Chrome browser, that could be something that plays in but if it's CSS then it's about kind of the the HTML is already loaded and the HTML is what we would take into account for indexing and it's just a matter of maybe shifting things around on the page with the layout. So from from a rendering point of view I don't see a new CSS property changing anything. It would be essentially like we would still index the content normally."
John added "the other thing that you kind of suggested is with regards to speed if it is something that affects the speed that users see the content in then that could play a role with regards to core web vitals. Because for core web vitals we use essentially the speed that the users see, the field data, and if users are using a modern version of Chrome and they're seeing pages load faster because the pages are implementing HTML in a better way in CSS and JavaScript or whatever, then that's something that will be ever reflected in the field data over time and we could take that into account through the core web vitals."
Here is the video embed:
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
