Chrome's experimental Core Web Vitals now count single-page app navigations

A single-page app that has been failing Core Web Vitals because every click in a long session counted against the first page can now see a fairer score.

Annie Sullivan at Chrome announced the change in a web.dev post on 13 October 2026. Three experimental metrics are now in the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX): LCP, INP and CLS, each with a soft-navigation variant. They are available in BigQuery, the CrUX API and the History API, and CrUX Vis has a new toggle to show them.

What a soft navigation is, and what the stable metric missed

A soft navigation is an in-app page change where a single-page app updates the URL and swaps content with JavaScript, without a full browser reload. The Soft Navigations web platform API shipped on by default in Chrome 151 on 28 July 2026.

Before this release, CrUX only recorded the first hard load when a user arrived on an SPA. Every later in-app view change was folded back into that landing page, including the slowest INP interaction across the whole session and every layout shift. The experimental metrics report each soft navigation under the destination URL and measure speed, responsiveness and visual stability for that view by itself.

Which sites move and by how much

Chrome groups CrUX origins by the share of page views that are soft navigations. Across all origins, 66 to 75 percent have fewer than 5 percent soft navigations, and 7.0 percent on Android and 10.6 percent on desktop have more than half. The picture flips on the biggest sites: among the top 1,000 origins, 35 percent on Android and 42 percent on desktop have more than half their page views as soft navigations.

For the small group with more than 50 percent soft navigations, every metric improves. Among Android origins where 75 to 100 percent of page views are soft, the share with Good LCP moves from 26 percent on the stable metric to 87 percent on the experimental one. Chrome's post says this is because follow-up clicks are faster on any site, bringing SPA-heavy sites with many follow-up views in line with multi-page sites with many follow-up views, rather than because SPAs are faster overall.

INP roughly doubles its Android pass rate for SPA-heavy sites, because responsiveness is now measured per page view instead of taking the slowest interaction across a whole session. SPA-heavy sites still trail multi-page sites on INP, so heavy JavaScript during a route transition can still cost. CLS improves because shifts are grouped by individual view, which brings SPA-heavy desktop sites in line with multi-page sites and nearly closes the gap on Android.

Across the whole September CrUX release, 55.9 percent of origins passed Core Web Vitals on the stable metric. With soft navigations counted, 59.5 percent did.

When the stable score moves

Google's stable Core Web Vitals scores are unchanged for now. Chrome says the experimental status is set to conclude around May 2027, and Search Console will adopt the new data once the metrics leave experimental. The November CrUX release is expected to add soft-navigation versions of First Contentful Paint and navigation types.

An SPA team that has been arguing with a search team about a failing INP has, for the first time, a Chrome-published number that measures the same site as the user sees it. Nothing in Search Console reads from it yet, so this is a planning signal rather than a ranking change.

Source

Experimental soft navigation metrics now available in CrUX, Chrome web.dev blog.