INP Feedback - my 2 cents

[Karl]

As I see it, there is a type of website whose organic search results are being hurt by INP. From what I see, any site that is predominantly a tool/webapplication site does not pass the mobile INP tests.  This leads to lower rankings for the origin if the site does not have enough traffic to generate INP results at the URL level. Generally, a tool site will have more pages with tools than, say, text content, and therefore, the origin results will be adversely impacted (skewed) versus, say, a blog that might feature one or two tools.

Look at the Google "tools" that are listed elsewhere in posts in this group. They all fail Core Web Vitals.

This is particularly hurtful when Google acknowledges that Android has a bug that causes erroneous results for INP. See:

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41485748

Unexpected high INP on Text Input Focus

Probably very close to 100% of "tools" use text inputs!

Here's an example. Do a search for "adjustable rate mortgage calculator." Within the first 30 or so results, there are a lot of bank sites that have a few tools relative to other types of content.  Some of those sites have bought the calculator created by Dinkytown (I do not represent Dinkytown), yet Dinktown's hosted version is nowhere to be found. Doesn't seem right to me that the tool's creator doesn't rank higher than at least some of his customers.

In my case, I write tax preparation tools. Up until INP became a ranking factor, one of my tools was consistently in the top 3 spots in the SERPs. On the day INP became a ranking factor in March (just before U.S. tax filing due date!) the page dropped to below 10. Okay, so be it. But here's the thing: the tools ranking higher had not been updated for 2023 changes.

Look at this from the point of view of search  USERS. I doubt very much if a CPA cares if my site's INP is approximately 250ms on slow mobile devices and the top ones are faster if the top ones aren't updated for current regulations. This is particularly true when you consider that tools are most frequently used from desktop computers (does Google really expect most users to set up ad campaigns in Ads using mobile devices?)

For the record, here's the result from Google Analytics Explorer for INP for my site for mobile devices for the past 28 days. Even with these results, I still fail Core Web Vitals:

(Not sure if you'll see the image: Total INP events: 3,940, good: 3,051, needs-improvement: 636.  poor: 253.)

As far as I can see, INP is not ready for prime time.

By the way, I assume you know that when users close the ads automatically inserted by AdSense at the bottom of the webpage, that click also fails INP. (The id that fails is #dismiss-button.)