Run your site through PageSpeed Insights and you get a number out of 100 in a coloured circle. It is satisfying, it is comparable, it fits in an email to a developer, and it feels like an answer. It is not the number Google ranks on. And for a large share of Canadian small-business websites, the number Google does rank on is not visible in the report at all — the panel where it should appear is simply empty, and most people never notice, because the score below it is right there being green or red and demanding attention. This article is about that gap. What the score actually measures, why it is not what Google uses, why your field data panel is probably blank, and what to measure instead when it is. The metrics themselves — what LCP, INP and CLS are, what the thresholds mean, how to fix each one — are covered properly in our complete guide to Core Web Vitals and SEO. This piece is about the tool, and specifically about reading it correctly when it is only telling you half of what it was designed to tell you. PageSpeed Insights is two tools sharing one screen The single most useful thing to understand about PageSpeed Insights is that the report is not one assessment. It is two entirely separate data sources stacked vertically, produced by different means, measuring different things, on different timescales. The top panel: what real people experienced The upper section — headed along the lines of discovering what your real users are experiencing — comes from the Chrome User Experience Report, usually shortened to CrUX. This is aggregated performance data collected from real Chrome users who have not disabled usage reporting, gathered over a rolling 28-day window, and reported at the 75th percentile. It is field data: actual visits, actual devices, actual networks, actual conditions. This is the data Google uses in its page experience assessment. When Search Console tells you a group of URLs is failing Core Web Vitals, this is where that judgement comes from. The bottom panel: what happened in one simulated test The lower section is a Lighthouse...
