The median Canadian SMB site scored INP between 320–480ms on mobile in Q1 2026 — well outside Google's 'Good' (<200ms) threshold and meaningfully correlated with ranking softness on competitive queries.
We sampled 50 Canadian SMB sites across legal, dental, HVAC, and accounting verticals and measured 28-day field INP via the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). 64% of sites had a mobile p75 INP above 300ms; only 14% scored 'Good.' Sites in the 'Good' bucket appeared on the first page of competitive city + service queries at roughly 1.7× the rate of 'Poor' bucket peers in the same vertical.
Methodology
50-site CrUX field-data pull (Q1 2026); top-10 ranking comparison on a 30-query basket per vertical.
Limits of this finding
Sites with good INP also tend to be on better hosting and have better engineering generally; some of the ranking lift is correlated with overall technical hygiene rather than INP alone.
More Technical findings
Pages whose primary content was JavaScript-rendered (visible only after hydration) were retrieved less often by RAG-based LLMs than equivalent server-rendered pages.
We mirrored 6 SPA pages as prerendered HTML on the same domain. Retrieval inclusion (the LLM citing or summarising the content at all) rose by roughly 2x on the prerendered variants over a 3-week window.
Removing JSON-LD that contradicted visible page content lifted Rich Results Test pass rates and removed manual-action risk in the 9 cases we audited.
Across 9 client sites, we removed inflated AggregateRating, FAQ entries with no visible answer, and Service entries for services not actually offered. Subsequent Search Console manual-action notices that had been pending dropped to zero.
Canadian sites with INP (Interaction to Next Paint) above 200ms see roughly 22% lower SERP click-through compared to sub-200ms peers in our matched-pair sample.
We matched 64 Canadian SMB sites into pairs by industry, query intent, and serp position, then segmented by INP performance. The sub-200ms cohort had a mean CTR of 4.1%; the >200ms cohort 3.2% — a roughly 22% relative gap. INP became Google's third Core Web Vital in March 2024; this is the first full year where its ranking weight has been observably material in our data.
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