1 Core Web Vitals in 2025
INP (Interaction to Next Paint) replaced FID in March 2024 and remains the trickiest CWV to optimise. A good INP score is under 200ms. Common culprits: long JavaScript tasks blocking the main thread, unoptimised event handlers, and third-party scripts. Use Chrome DevTools's Performance panel to identify long tasks. Prioritise breaking up tasks exceeding 50ms and deferring non-critical scripts. Sites that achieve good INP scores rank on average 1.3 positions higher than slow counterparts in competitive SERPs.
2 Crawl Budget & Indexability
For sites over 10,000 pages, crawl budget management is non-negotiable. Block parameterised URLs, session IDs, and pagination variants via robots.txt. Ensure your XML sitemap only includes canonical, indexable URLs returning 200 status codes. Use Google Search Console's Crawl Stats report to identify when Googlebot is wasting budget on low-value URLs. A well-managed crawl budget means Google discovers your new content days, not weeks, after publication.
3 Structured Data & Rich Results
Schema markup is table stakes in 2025. Implement Article, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, and HowTo schema where applicable. For e-commerce, Product and Review schema drive rich result eligibility. Validate all schema with Google's Rich Results Test and monitor for errors in Search Console. AI Overviews disproportionately pull from pages with structured data — correct schema implementation is your entry ticket to AI-generated answer boxes.
4 AI-Search Signals
Google's Gemini-based ranking systems now evaluate content helpfulness using signals traditional audits ignore: content freshness timestamps, author entity signals (linked author profiles), first-hand experience indicators (original data, unique perspectives), and citation quality. Audit every key page for: a visible publication and last-updated date, a linked author bio with credentials, at least one original data point or proprietary insight, and outbound links to authoritative primary sources.
Priya Nair
Head of Technical SEO
Expert in digital marketing strategy and AI-powered growth. Leads our Technical SEO practice and has worked with 100+ brands across 20 industries.