The honest answer to what is new is: less than the headlines suggest. Search engines still need to crawl your pages, render them, understand them and decide whether they serve users well. What has changed is that some standards are stricter, and that pages are now also read by AI-powered search features that summarize answers. Both reward the same technical foundation.
Core Web Vitals, now with INP
Google's Core Web Vitals are three metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) for loading, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) for responsiveness and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for visual stability. INP replaced First Input Delay in March 2024. It looks at interactions throughout the visit, not only the first one, so heavy JavaScript, long tasks on the main thread and third-party scripts show up clearly. A good score means LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP within 200 milliseconds and CLS of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of real-user data. Lighthouse lab scores help with diagnosis, but field data is what counts.
Crawlability and rendering
- Make sure important content and links are in the HTML or reliably rendered, not hidden behind clicks or loaded only after user actions.
- Use real links with href attributes for navigation so crawlers can follow them.
- Keep XML sitemaps current, and make sure robots.txt does not block the CSS and JavaScript needed to render pages.
- Use canonical tags consistently, and on Arabic and English sites add hreflang annotations that point both ways.
- Return correct status codes: 301 for moved pages and 404 or 410 for removed ones, instead of soft 404s.
Structured data and page experience
Schema.org markup in JSON-LD, such as Organization, Product, Article, BreadcrumbList and LocalBusiness, helps search engines understand who you are and what each page is about. Google has narrowed some rich result types in recent years, so treat markup as a way to be understood rather than a promise of special display, and keep it consistent with what is visible on the page. Beyond that, the page experience basics still apply: HTTPS everywhere, a layout that works on mobile and no intrusive pop-ups covering the content.
Most technical SEO gains come from doing the established basics well and checking them regularly.