Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit this morning that the page experience update that incorporates core web vitals is more than a tie breaker ranking signal. He said “it is a ranking factor, and it’s more than a tie-breaker, but it also doesn’t replace relevance.”

This is a surprise change of messaging because Google has implied that the page experience update is a tie breaker in the past. Gary Illyes from Google said the page experience update won’t be drastic and might be more like a tie breaker signal than something really big. John Mueller of Google said this won’t be a drastic update like other Google updates, he added it will be a slow rollout and not felt too much. Danny Sullivan of Google said it won’t result in a massive change when rolled out.

So I guess it is somewhere between a tie breaker signal and a very low weight signal? This is why John said on Reddit “but it also doesn’t replace relevance.” John explained:

The sad part, so many people are seeing ranking changes in June and July and saying it has to with the page experience update or core web vitals, it is likely more related to the July core update and the June core update or any other recent update we reported on – and very much so unlikely due to the page experience update, which began rolling out June 15th through the end of this month.

Forum discussion at Reddit.

Update: Google’s John Mueller told me there was no change here to how the ranking signals worked or did not work.

I asked:

John responded: