Google Adds Four Experimental Ad-Experience Metrics to CrUX

Google has added four experimental ad-experience metrics to the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), the same anonymised field dataset that supplies the Core Web Vitals figures in PageSpeed Insights and Search Console. The four are Ad Count (the average number of distinct ad frames visible in the viewport as a user scrolls), Ad Density (the average fraction of the visible viewport taken up by ads), Ad Weight: CPU (the computational load of loading and running ad scripts) and Ad Weight: Network (the network traffic those scripts pull down). Like the rest of CrUX, they are 28-day rolling averages of real Chrome users on desktop, Android and ChromeOS; Chrome on iOS is excluded. They are available now through the CrUX API, the CrUX History API and the Ad panel in Chrome DevTools, with the CrUX BigQuery dataset to follow. The documentation is dated 15 September 2026.

If your pages carry display advertising, this gives you field data to check whether the ads themselves are dragging real users’ page experience, rather than inferring it from a lab test of your own machine. Pull the metrics for a slow template and you can see whether ad density or ad script weight is the cause before you touch the rest of the page. Two limits from Google’s own documentation: the metrics are experimental, and they are not part of Core Web Vitals and carry no Good, Needs improvement or Poor thresholds. The documentation says nothing about ranking either way, so treat them as diagnostics for your own page experience, not as a signal to optimise towards.

Sources

• Ad experience metrics, Chrome for Developers
• Google Adds New Ad Experience Metrics To CrUX Report, Search Engine Journal