Google Search won’t be affected by new content-visibility CSS, suggests Google

Google’s John Mueller states that the new content-visibility CSS supported by current Chrome browsers will not have an influence on the Google Search. It may have an influence on the speed of your pages, which may have an affect on your core web vitals, but it should have no major effect on your search rankings.

Despite the fact that the Chrome team claims that the new CSS property improves rendering efficiency, it should have no more than a minor influence on your CRuX data.

An SEO practictioner, Baruch Labunski, inquired about the influence of the new Chrome content visibility CSS property on Google Search and ranks in a recently conducted Google SEO session. Google’s John Mueller replied ‘No, not really’. It may have an influence on CRuX data, but it has little impact on Google’s overall performance, he added.

At 6:58 during this past Friday’s video, Baruch inquired. “I want to know what is going to happen with the new CSS property that you guys just recently put into Chrome browser, so the new CSS property that I can apply to render content better,” he said.

When I first heard this, I had no idea what Baruch was talking about, and John said, “I don’t know which one you mean.” Then Baruch explained that it was the content visibility attribute that was causing the problem. “I doubt we do much with it in search,” John remarked.

Baruch further asserted, “Because, you know, it’s all about increasing load times and so forth. So I just wanted to know how critical it would be to integrate it into your site in the future, because a lot of developers are experiencing problems. And SEOs collaborate, and they’re having a lot of problems with CSS and javascript, which are the two primary difficulties.”

John said “yeah, I don’t think we would do anything special with like new CSS attributes or new HTML tags things like that in search. There are two places where it could come into play on the one hand when we render the pages because we use a modern Chrome browser, that could be something that plays in but if it’s CSS then it’s about kind of the the HTML is already loaded and the HTML is what we would take into account for indexing and it’s just a matter of maybe shifting things around on the page with the layout. So from from a rendering point of view I don’t see a new CSS property changing anything. It would be essentially like we would still index the content normally.”

John went on to say “The second point you made about speed is that if it impacts the pace at which people view material, it might have an impact on basic web vitals. Because we use the speed that users see, the field data, for core web vitals, and if users are using a modern version of Chrome and they’re seeing pages load faster because the pages are implementing HTML in a better way in CSS and JavaScript or whatever, then that’s something that will be reflected in the field data over time, and we could take that into account through the correlator.”

Here is the glimpse of the video: