On October 13, 2026, Chrome added experimental versions of LCP, INP and CLS to the Chrome UX Report (CrUX) that include soft navigations, the JavaScript-driven page changes single-page apps make without loading a new document. About 70% of sites have little or no soft navigation traffic and should see no change; SPA-heavy sites will generally score better. Search Console keeps using the stable metrics until Chrome graduates the new ones, which it is aiming to do in May 2027.
What Chrome changed
Core Web Vitals now have an experimental version that measures single-page apps properly. On October 13, Chrome's Annie Sullivan announced that the Chrome UX Report (CrUX), the real-user dataset behind the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console, now includes experimental versions of all three metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
The difference is that the new versions count soft navigations. That's the name for what a single-page app (SPA) does when you click a link: instead of loading a new HTML document, JavaScript swaps the content and updates the URL. Lots of modern sites work this way, especially ones built on React, Vue or similar frameworks.
The old metrics mostly saw only the first, full page load of a visit. Every later click inside the app was invisible to LCP, while INP and CLS piled the whole session onto one page view. That made SPAs look worse than they often felt to use, and it made them hard to compare with ordinary multi-page sites.
The background: Chrome turned on its Soft Navigations API by default in Chrome 151 this summer. This CrUX release is the first time that data shows up in the public dataset.
Who it affects
Most sites: nobody. Chrome says around 70% of origins in CrUX have little to no soft navigation traffic, meaning fewer than 5% of page views. If your site is a normal WordPress, Squarespace or static site where every click loads a new page, Chrome's own post says you shouldn't expect your metrics to change.
SPA-heavy sites: a lot. Only about 7–11% of origins use soft navigations for more than half their page views, but for those sites the change is big. Chrome's example: for Android origins where 75–100% of page views are soft navigations, the share with good LCP goes from 26% on the stable metric to 87% on the experimental one.
Across the whole dataset, 55.9% of origins pass all three Core Web Vitals on the stable metrics and 59.5% pass with soft navigations included.
One honest caveat from Chrome: the higher SPA scores mostly come from follow-up clicks being fast, which is true of any site, not from SPAs being faster overall. And INP for SPAs still trails multi-page sites, so heavy JavaScript running during route changes still hurts.
What it doesn't change yet
Search Console and rankings stay on the stable metrics. Google says Search Console will only switch to the new data after the metrics leave experimental status. Chrome is aiming for May 2027, subject to feedback, and it's warning that numbers may shift month to month while the measurement settles. Under the normal Web Vitals lifecycle, a metric sits in a "pending" stage before it becomes stable, so treat May 2027 as a target, not a date.
More is coming sooner. Chrome expects experimental First Contentful Paint and navigation-type data in the November CrUX release.
What I'd do with this
If you run a marketing site on a traditional CMS, file this under "good to know" and move on. Your Core Web Vitals work is the same as last month: image sizes, fonts, third-party scripts and layout stability.
If your site or web app is an SPA, it's worth half an hour now:
- Compare your numbers. Open CrUX Vis, turn on the option to include soft navigations and see how far your origin moves. If you have the traffic, check per-URL data in the CrUX API too.
- Look at INP on route changes. That's where Chrome says SPAs still lag. Big client-side renders and analytics calls firing on every route change are the usual suspects.
- Add soft navigations to your own monitoring. Chrome has documentation for measuring them in real-user monitoring. Your own data will be more useful than the origin-level summary.
- Don't rebuild for this. If you were thinking about moving an SPA to server rendering purely to pass Core Web Vitals, wait and see the experimental numbers first. There may be less of a gap than the old report showed.
- Don't redesign around a preview. Rankings still use the stable metrics. Fix real slowness, not the metric.
My take: this is a correction more than a new rule. The old metrics penalized a whole category of sites for a measurement gap, and Chrome is closing it carefully. The sites that should care most are the ones that blamed their framework for bad scores. Some of that blame was the measuring stick.
Questions we hear a lot
What is a soft navigation?
It's when a single-page app (built with frameworks like React, Vue or Next.js in client-side mode) swaps the page content and updates the URL with JavaScript instead of loading a new HTML document. Until now, Core Web Vitals mostly measured only the first, full page load of a visit.
Will the new soft navigation metrics change my Google rankings?
Not yet. Google says stable Core Web Vitals scores are unchanged and Search Console will only switch to the new data after the metrics leave experimental status, which Chrome is aiming for in May 2027, subject to feedback.
How do I see whether my site is affected?
Chrome's CrUX Vis tool has an option to include soft navigations, so you can compare your origin with and without them. The experimental data is also in the CrUX API, the CrUX History API and BigQuery, if your site has enough Chrome traffic to appear in CrUX.
Sources
- web.dev: Introducing experimental Core Web Vitals metrics to the Chrome UX Report (Oct 13, 2026)
- Chrome for Developers: Chrome UX Report release notes
- Search Engine Journal: Google adds experimental soft navigation metrics to CrUX
Filed under Development
Evan Walker
Founder & Creative Director at Satellite Black, with experience across a broad range of industries working as a Creative Director, Developer, and strategist.
