Dwell Time

Why It Matters

Content that keeps users engaged sends positive behavioral signals to search algorithms and indicates genuine value to users. In the AI era, engagement quality also matters for AI citation worthiness-AI systems increasingly weigh user satisfaction signals when evaluating source quality. Pages with poor engagement despite decent rankings may be deprioritized in future AI retrieval selections.

How It Works

Dwell time is estimated by search engines from the gap between a click event and any subsequent activity in the search session. It cannot be directly measured in Google Analytics, which reports session duration using active interaction timestamps. Proxy metrics including scroll depth, time on page (Analytics), and bounce rate provide partial indicators of dwell time performance.

Use Cases

• Adding interactive elements, videos, or data visualizations to increase time-on-page
• Improving page load speed to reduce abandonment before content is consumed
• Using internal linking to extend user sessions beyond the initial landing page
• Improving content relevance-to-title alignment to reduce pogo-sticking from disappointed clickers
• Adding table of contents to long-form content enabling users to navigate to relevant sections

Best Practices

• Match content to the intent implied by the title and meta description precisely-disappointed users bounce immediately
• Use engaging multimedia (videos, interactive charts, images) to extend content consumption time
• Add prominent internal links to related content to encourage session continuation beyond the first page
• Improve page load speed-users abandon slow pages before dwell time accumulates
• Structure content with clear, progressive disclosure so users invest in reading before they can leave
• Monitor scroll depth and time-on-page in Google Analytics to identify pages with poor engagement