dwell time
Also called: dwell time seo, long click
Dwell time is how long a searcher stays on a page after clicking it in the results before returning to the search engine. A long dwell time suggests the page satisfied the query; a quick bounce back to the results (a short click) suggests it did not.
Bing’s Duane Forrester popularized the term in a 2011 Webmaster Blog post, describing it as the time between when a user clicks a result and when they come back. He suggested a minute or two reads as a satisfied visitor, while a couple of seconds reads as a poor result.
Dwell time vs bounce rate vs time on page
The metric is easy to confuse with two things it is not. Bounce rate and average engagement time live in your own analytics (GA4). Dwell time lives on the search engine’s side: it sees the click out to your page and the return to the results, and you never get that number directly.
Google’s public position is that it does not rank on dwell time. Gary Illyes called such signals “made up crap,” and Martin Splitt said engagement metrics are not used for ranking. That said, the 2024 Content Warehouse API leak exposed click fields inside NavBoost (goodClicks, badClicks, lastLongestClick), and Pandu Nayak’s DOJ testimony described roughly 13 months of retained click data. So Google clearly watches whether clicks stick, even if it will not call it dwell time.
Treat dwell time as an outcome, not a dial. It rises when the page matches intent, loads fast, and is easy to scan, and it falls when searchers bounce back to try the next result.
How it affects your traffic
A fast return to the results (a short click) tells the engine your page missed, and the fixes are usually mechanical. An SEO Audit surfaces the exact triggers: slow load, an intent mismatch between the query and the page, thin content above the fold, a cramped mobile layout, or an intrusive pop-up. Fixing those keeps searchers reading instead of pogo-sticking back to Google, which protects the rankings you already earned. Our SEO Audit checks these page by page.
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