What is Dwell Time?
How long a visitor stays before returning to results. An indirect satisfaction proxy, not a confirmed ranking factor; optimize the experience, not the stopwatch.
Related terms
Engagement Rate
The share of sessions with meaningful interaction (time, scroll, events, conversions). GA4’s headline quality metric replacing bounce rate for most analysis.
Pogo-Sticking
Bouncing between results and the SERP, suggesting no result satisfied the query. At scale it flags intent mismatch for the ranking pages, not a penalty on any one of them.
Bounce Rate
Single-page sessions without further interaction. Weak as a quality verdict alone (answers can satisfy in one page), useful for spotting broken or mismatched landings.
Google Search Console (GSC)
The free official view of how Google sees a site: impressions, clicks, positions, indexation, and issues. Audits join its demand data to crawl findings before prioritizing anything.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Event-based analytics measuring what visitors do after they arrive. Pair it with Search Console to connect rankings to engagement and conversions instead of optimizing positions blindly.
Impression
One appearance of a page or link in results or AI answers. Impressions without clicks diagnose snippets and intent fit; falling impressions diagnose demand or visibility loss.