Google Search Console's performance report starting on May 13, 2022 now logs impressions for additional desktop features specific with the Page Experience report. One example Google gave was "top stories." Google said you may see an increase in your desktop impressions when you filter by Good Page Experience in the search appearance filter.
Google has updated the terminology to explain this is specific to the impressions logged directly in the Page Experience report within Google Search Console. Google updated the the message to read:
Search Console now logs impressions in the Page Experience report for additional desktop features, such as Top Stories. As a result, you may see an increase in your desktop impressions in the Page Experience report, as well as in the Search and News performance reports when filtering by the "Good Page Experience" search appearance.
John Mueller of Google also replied to me saying:
Hi Barry -- we made this a bit clearer in the note. This is just about the impressions in the Page Experience report. Thanks for flagging this!
— 🐝 johnmu.xml (personal) 🐝 (@JohnMu) May 16, 2022
Here is the remainder of the story as I posted last night but now it is much clearer and makes more sense.
Google posted these details over here on May 23, 2022 and wrote:
Search Console now logs impressions for additional desktop features, such as Top Stories. As a result, you may see an increase in your desktop impressions in the Search and News performance reports when filtered by the "Good Page Experience" search appearance, as well as desktop impressions in the Page Experience report.
I am not going to lie, I find this messaging from Google super confusing. Why?
(1) Hasn't Google already tracked top stories impressions and clicks in Search Console?
We know they did track Top Stories for mobile forever - and you'd assume they did for desktop as well.
(2) What does the good page experience search appearance have to do with this?
My guess is that maybe Google did not track top stories for desktop? But I thought Google did. Maybe they didn't track it in conjunction with the good page experience search appearance? Still, that doesn't seem to make sense to me since Google added all these into the Search Console reports back in January 2022 before the page experience update rolled out on desktop.
I did ask Google for clarification because honestly, I am super confused by this messaging. This note was just posted today, Sunday, May 15th and I wanted to cover this now so SEOs know about this confusion and to hold off until we hear from Google.
When I hear back, I will update you all.
Here is what was posted:
Forum discussion at Twitter.
