Dwell time is the time between a searcher clicking a result and returning to the search results page. It is a concept from the SEO industry, not a metric Google publishes or has confirmed using. Bounce rate is an analytics figure, the share of visits that view one page, and Google's ranking systems have no access to your analytics at all. Both are worth watching for what they say about your pages, not for what they do to your rankings.
Why bounce rate cannot be a ranking factor
It lives in your analytics account, which Google's ranking systems do not read, and a large share of sites have no analytics at all or block it under privacy rules. It is also meaningless for most content: a person who searches for opening hours, reads them and leaves has bounced, and the page did its job perfectly. Google's staff have said for years that bounce rate is not used, and the current version of Google's own analytics redefined it as simply the inverse of engagement rate: a session under ten seconds with no second page and no key event.
Dwell time is a better idea and still unconfirmed
Unlike bounce rate, Google can in principle observe the gap between a click and a return to its own results page. Its public position is that it does not rank on that kind of behaviour because it is too noisy. Evidence from the 2023 antitrust trial showed that aggregated click behaviour does feed Google's systems in some form. What nobody outside Google can say is how, or whether the duration of a visit is part of it. Treat any tool or consultant quoting a target dwell time as guessing.
What the numbers are good for
Diagnosis. A guide with a two-minute average engagement time is being read. A guide with eight seconds is being abandoned, and the title or the opening has overpromised. A product page with a high one-page exit and no enquiries is losing people somewhere on the page, and a session recording tool will show you where. That is the value: understanding your visitors, not appeasing an algorithm.
What not to do
Pad pages to keep people longer. Hide the answer below the fold so they scroll. Add auto-playing video. Every one of these makes the page worse for the person who arrived wanting something, and the only measurable effect will be on your conversion rate, downwards.
Sources
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
Pogo-sticking
Pogo-sticking is when a searcher clicks a result, comes straight back to the results page, clicks another, and repeats until something satisfies them. Google has said publicly that it does not use it as a ranking signal, because people go back for too many reasons. Testimony in the 2023 antitrust trial confirmed that Google does use aggregated click behaviour over long periods. Both statements can be true, and neither changes what a page needs to do.
CTR
Click-through rate is the share of people who saw your result and clicked it: clicks divided by impressions, shown as a percentage in Search Console. It falls steeply with position, so it only means anything when compared against the position it was earned at. Whether Google uses clicks to rank is a question with two honest halves, covered below.
Thin content
Thin content is a page that offers a visitor little or nothing they could not get elsewhere: empty category pages, copied product descriptions, auto-generated text, a paragraph wrapped around an advert. Google has no minimum word count and says so. A short page that answers a question is not thin. A long page that says nothing is.
Title tag
The page title is the text in a page's title element, shown as the clickable headline in search results. Google uses it as the main source for that headline, along with the visible heading, link text and other prominent text, and will rewrite it when it judges the title unhelpful. A good title says specifically what the page is, in the words the searcher used, without padding.