Build a CrUX Dashboard to Track Core Web Vitals for SEO

A Lighthouse score tells you how a page performed in one test. Google’s page experience assessment uses something else: field data from real Chrome users, collected in the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). The CrUX Dashboard turns that data into a monthly report you can track over time, run against competitors and use as a baseline before changing anything. Setting one up takes a couple of minutes.

Update: Google has since deprecated the Looker Studio CrUX Dashboard shown in the video. The same real-user data now lives in CrUX Vis, which updates weekly instead of monthly and shows URL-level data where Chrome has enough of it. The reading of the numbers described below is unchanged.

The video shows both ways to create the dashboard, a one-step launcher and a longer route that produces an editable, shareable report, then walks through what each tab shows.

Why field data is the number to watch for search

The Core Web Vitals report in Search Console and the real-user panel at the top of PageSpeed Insights both come from CrUX. The dashboard draws on the monthly CrUX dataset, so it moves more slowly than those, but it puts a long history in one place.

That history is the point. A single PageSpeed test can swing from one run to the next. A month-by-month chart of real visitor experience shows whether a change actually helped, and it sits neatly alongside your traffic and rankings data.

Two ways to set it up

The quick launcher

A launcher built by Rick Viscomi creates the report in one step. Type in the site’s address, press enter, and about ten seconds later you have a Data Studio report (Data Studio is now called Looker Studio). The trade-off is flexibility: you cannot edit much of it, and while you may be able to share it, you cannot embed it.

The longer route

Google’s own CrUX Dashboard connector asks for the same address, then takes you through Connect and Create report. The result is the same report, but you can rename it, share it with clients or colleagues and schedule it to be emailed on a regular basis. For agency or client reporting, this is the version to use. Links to both methods are in the video description.

Two things that stop it working

• The address must match exactly. Enter the primary address the site actually serves, including https and www if the site uses them. A mismatch returns nothing.
• The site needs enough traffic. CrUX only publishes data for sites with enough Chrome visitors. A brand new domain will have none, a recent hostname change can leave a gap, and borderline sites may have months missing from the charts.

Reading the report with SEO in mind

• Overview: the three Core Web Vitals, month by month. You can pick the date range and filter by phone or desktop. Phone is the view to prioritise, since Google indexes the mobile version of your pages.
• Time to First Byte: how quickly the server starts responding, which shapes how responsive the site feels. The target in the video is under half a second.
• First Contentful Paint: how quickly something appears on screen. Green is under 1.8 seconds. It is not a Core Web Vital, but a poor FCP leaves visitors arriving from search staring at a blank screen.
• Onload: the traditional load time metric. Less relevant now, still there if you report on it.
• Device breakdown: the share of visits from phones and desktops. On the site in the video, the mobile share had grown substantially over a year, which changes where optimisation effort should go.

Benchmark the competitors who outrank you

The dashboard works for any site with enough traffic, not just yours. Build one for each competitor ranking above you on your main terms. If they pass Core Web Vitals and you do not, that is a gap worth closing. If everyone in the results is in a similar state, page experience is less likely to be the deciding factor, and content or links deserve more of your attention.

Take a baseline before any change

New CrUX data is published on the second Tuesday of each month, sometimes a little later, so a change you make today will not show up for weeks. The video’s advice, given in the context of trialling NitroPack, applies to any optimisation project: set up the report first, record where you stand, then make the change.

When the next datasets arrive you can compare like with like. Mark the date of the change in your SEO log as well, and check the Search Console performance report for the following months to see whether clicks and average position moved with the field data. Speed improvements that never show up in either place were not worth reporting as wins.