Technical SEO Statistics for 2026: Core Web Vitals, Crawlability, Indexing, HTTPS, and Structured Data

In 2026, technical SEO has evolved from a checklist of fixes into a continuous performance discipline that directly shapes how search engines discover, evaluate, and rank content. Recently published data from the Web Almanac, Google’s Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), Ahrefs, and Backlinko confirm that the gap between technically optimized and technically broken websites has never been wider, and the consequences of that gap have never been more measurable.

Core Web Vitals pass rates have climbed significantly since Google first introduced the metrics in 2021, when only 32% of mobile sites passed all three thresholds. By the 2025 Web Almanac measurement period, 48% of mobile and 56% of desktop origins were achieving good scores across all three metrics. At the same time, the introduction of Interaction to Next Paint as a replacement for First Input Delay in March 2024 reset the interactivity benchmark for millions of sites, and the completion of Google’s mobile-first indexing rollout in July 2024 means every site on the web is now evaluated by mobile Googlebot first.

The data reveals persistent technical debt across the web at scale. Approximately 88% of all pages do not have sufficient CrUX data for Core Web Vitals to be used as a ranking signal at all. Only 65% of pages use canonical tags correctly. Invalid HTML elements in the head section affect 10% of all pages, potentially preventing crawlers from reading title tags, meta robots directives, canonical tags, and hreflang. And while structured data adoption has grown, only 0.9% of pages with video content include VideoObject markup, leaving the vast majority of video assets invisible to rich results.

This article compiles 75+ technical SEO statistics organized across nine thematic sections, drawn from the latest figures published within the last two years by primary data sources including the HTTP Archive Web Almanac, Google’s CrUX dataset, Ahrefs, Backlinko, Think with Google, and DebugBear. Every statistic is atomic, individually sourced, and linked directly to its original study or publication.

Scope and Methodology

Includes only publicly available technical SEO statistics relevant for 2026.
Based on the latest figures published within the last two years.
Sources include primary research, first-party platform data, institutional studies, and industry reports.
Each statistic is listed separately with its original source and study context.
No estimates, forecasts, interpretations, or recommendations are included.

Key Technical SEO Statistics for 2026

48% of mobile websites and 56% of desktop websites achieved good Core Web Vitals scores as of the 2025 Web Almanac measurement period (July 2025), based on a crawl of millions of websites using HTTP Archive CrUX data by The 2025 Web Almanac, HTTP Archive.
55.7% of origins globally passed all three Core Web Vitals thresholds as of January 2026 CrUX data, up from roughly 50% in early 2024, based on CrUX data analysis published by WhiteHat SEO Core Web Vitals Guide, sourced from Google CrUX.
53% of origins had good LCP, CLS, and INP scores as of September 2025, based on CrUX data analyzed by Addy Osmani, History of Core Web Vitals.
57.1% of websites pass Core Web Vitals on desktop compared to 49.7% of mobile websites, based on HTTP Archive CrUX data reported in the DebugBear 2025 Web Performance Year in Review.
96.55% of all pages on the web receive zero organic search traffic from Google, based on a large-scale study of billions of pages by Ahrefs.
Title tags are present on 98.6% of desktop pages and 98.5% of mobile pages as of the 2025 Web Almanac, based on a crawl of millions of websites by The 2025 Web Almanac, HTTP Archive.
Canonical tag usage was at 65% of both mobile and desktop pages in 2024, up from 61% mobile and 59% desktop in 2022, based on analysis of 16.9 million websites in the 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
53% of mobile and 51% of desktop inner pages had some structured data markup in 2024, based on a June 2024 crawl of 16.9 million websites by The 2024 Web Almanac, HTTP Archive.
Only 21 to 22% of website home pages were loaded over HTTP/1.1 in 2024, down sharply from 34% in 2022 and approximately 50% in 2020, based on analysis of over 1.3 billion requests in The 2024 Web Almanac HTTP chapter, HTTP Archive.
The probability of a user bouncing from a page increases by 32% when page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, based on research by Think with Google, cited in the Core Web Vitals and SEO Impact analysis.
55.6% of SEO professionals say technical SEO is often undervalued, based on a survey by TripleDart, cited in Ahrefs B2B SEO Statistics.
Invalid HTML elements in the head section were found in 10.1% of desktop sites and 10.3% of mobile sites in 2025, which can prevent crawlers from reading canonical tags, hreflang, and meta descriptions, based on analysis by The 2025 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.

Core Web Vitals Statistics

Good Core Web Vitals performance on mobile increased from 32% in 2021 to 36% in 2023, 44% in 2024, and 48% in 2025, based on CrUX data analyzed year-over-year in The 2025 Web Almanac Performance chapter, HTTP Archive.
Good Core Web Vitals performance on desktop increased from 41% in 2021 to 48% in 2023, 55% in 2024, and 56% in 2025, based on CrUX data analyzed in The 2025 Web Almanac Performance chapter, HTTP Archive.
Secondary pages show higher Core Web Vitals pass rates than home pages, with a 14-percentage-point lead on desktop (61% vs 47%) and an 11-percentage-point lead on mobile (56% vs 45%), based on page-level CrUX data in The 2025 Web Almanac Performance chapter, HTTP Archive.
Mobile home pages achieved 80% good INP scores in 2025, a 7 percentage point improvement over 2024, while secondary pages declined to 69%, based on The 2025 Web Almanac Performance chapter, HTTP Archive.
Desktop performance for INP remained strong at 97% good for home pages and 95% for secondary pages in 2025, based on The 2025 Web Almanac Performance chapter, HTTP Archive.
As of January 2026, 68.3% of origins achieved good LCP, 87.1% achieved good INP, and 80.9% achieved good CLS individually, but only 55.7% passed all three simultaneously, based on CrUX data reported by WhiteHat SEO, sourced from Google CrUX.
Pages ranking at position 1 in Google were 10% more likely to pass Core Web Vitals than URLs in position 9, based on CrUX ranking correlation data reported by Hostingstep Core Web Vitals Statistics, sourced from HTTP Archive.
Approximately 88% of all pages analyzed do not have sufficient CrUX field data for Core Web Vitals to be used as a Google ranking signal, based on analysis of 42 million+ URLs by Ahrefs, cited in WhiteHat SEO Core Web Vitals Guide.
WordPress sites achieved 50% good Core Web Vitals scores on desktop and 46% good on mobile as of November 2025, improving from 32.55% desktop and 28.31% mobile in prior periods, based on HTTP Archive CrUX data analyzed by Hostingstep Core Web Vitals Statistics.
“Slow” domains failing Core Web Vitals ranked 3.7 percentage points worse in visibility on average than “fast” passing domains, based on analysis reported by Weblogic.ie, sourced from EmailVendorSelection.

Page Speed Statistics

53% of users abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, based on research by Google, cited across multiple industry studies including PageOptimizer Pro.
A 100-millisecond delay in page speed can reduce conversion rates by 7%, based on research cited in Core Web Vitals and E-commerce Performance Guide, Magnet.
A 0.1-second improvement in page speed can transform the buyer journey and lead to significantly better customer experiences, based on research by Deloitte and Google, cited in Uxify Core Web Vitals Guide.
47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, based on an industry benchmark cited in Hobo Web Page Speed Guide, sourced from Akamai research.
The average web page load time is 3.21 seconds, based on Pingdom data reported in Hobo Web Page Speed Guide.
In 2024, e-commerce site Rakuten optimized its Core Web Vitals and saw conversion rates increase by 33% and revenue per visitor increase by 53%, based on a case study reported in Weblogic.ie Core Web Vitals Guide.
In 2024, PAIGE apparel re-architected its platform, achieving a 22% increase in Black Friday revenue and a 76% increase in conversion rates, based on a case study published at Web.dev Page Speed Performance Guide, sourced from Google.
In 2023, redBus improved its INP, which resulted in a 7% increase in sales, based on a case study published at Web.dev Page Speed Case Studies.
72.3% of sites have slow pages that can negatively impact organic search rankings, based on data cited in HeavyWeight Digital SEO Statistics 2024.

Crawlability and Indexing Statistics

83.9% of robots.txt files for mobile sites and 83.5% of desktop sites returned a 200 status code in 2024, up from 82.4% and 81.5% respectively in 2022, based on a crawl of 16.9 million websites in The 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
Robots tag adoption increased from 66.3% in 2022 to 98.2% in 2024, based on analysis of 16.9 million websites in The 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
10.6% of desktop and 10.9% of mobile pages have invalid HTML elements in the head section that can cause crawlers to miss canonical tags, hreflang, and meta descriptions, based on a June 2024 crawl by The 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
GPTBot blocking in robots.txt files increased from 2.9% on desktop and 2.7% on mobile in 2024 to 4.5% on desktop and 4.2% on mobile in 2025, a 55% increase year-over-year, based on robots.txt analysis in The 2025 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
ClaudeBot blocking in robots.txt files nearly doubled from 1.9% on desktop and 1.6% on mobile in 2024 to 3.6% on desktop and 3.4% on mobile in 2025, based on The 2025 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
48% of the most widely used news websites across ten countries were blocking OpenAI’s crawlers, and 24% were blocking Google’s AI crawler as of a recent study, based on a study by Reuters Institute, cited in Ahrefs SEO Statistics.
Only 5.7% of newly published pages will rank in the top 10 Google search results within a year of publication, based on a large-scale study by Ahrefs.
The average page currently ranking in Google’s top 10 is more than two years old, based on a large-scale study by Ahrefs.
Websites with excessive 404 errors experience a 12% drop in user trust, and fixing broken links can improve crawl rates by 18%, based on data cited in PageOptimizer Pro Technical SEO Statistics 2025.
Custom 404 pages reduce bounce rates by up to 20%, based on data cited in PageOptimizer Pro Technical SEO Statistics 2025.

Canonical Tag and Duplicate Content Statistics

Canonical tag usage was at 65% of mobile and 69% of desktop pages in 2024, up from 61% and 59% respectively in 2022, based on a crawl of 16.9 million websites in The 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
The rate of pages where canonical tags conflict between HTTP response and rendered HTML doubled from 0.4% in 2022 to 0.8% in 2024, based on analysis in The 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
2.1% of mobile pages have their canonical URL changed during the rendering process, based on analysis in The 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
Canonicalized pages (where the canonical tag points to a different URL) increased from 6% desktop and 8% mobile in 2024 to 7% desktop and 9% mobile in 2025, based on The 2025 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
Fewer than 10% of global sites use hreflang tags correctly, and among those that do implement them, conflicts with canonical tags or incorrect syntax are common, based on analysis of 16.9 million websites reported in SEOZoom 2024 Web Almanac Analysis.
Over 67% of domains using hreflang have implementation issues, based on a large-scale study cited in Ahrefs SEO Statistics.
95.2% of sites have 3XX redirect issues, and 88% have HTTP to HTTPS redirect issues, based on data cited in HeavyWeight Digital SEO Statistics 2024.
Over 60% of websites have pages that link to redirects, impacting their indexing and ranking potential, based on data cited in HeavyWeight Digital SEO Statistics 2024.

HTTPS and Security Statistics

HTTPS adoption continued to increase toward 100% in 2024, with the growth rate slowing as it approached full adoption, based on TLS adoption tracking in The 2024 Web Almanac Security chapter, HTTP Archive.
Only 21 to 22% of website home pages were loaded over HTTP/1.1 in 2024, down from 34% in 2022, with 78 to 79% of pages served over HTTP/2 or HTTP/3, based on analysis of over 1.3 billion requests in The 2024 Web Almanac HTTP chapter, HTTP Archive.
Less than 4% of all CDN-delivered requests were served over HTTP/1.1 in 2024, compared to up to 29% of non-CDN requests, based on analysis of 1.3 billion requests in The 2024 Web Almanac HTTP chapter, HTTP Archive.
HTTP/3 support across the web is closer to 30% in reality, despite appearing as only 7 to 9% in the Web Almanac measurements due to HTTP/3’s discovery-based adoption mechanism, based on methodology analysis in The 2024 Web Almanac HTTP chapter, HTTP Archive.
CSP (Content Security Policy) header adoption increased from 15% of all hosts in 2022 to 19% in 2024, a 27% relative increase, based on The 2024 Web Almanac Security chapter, HTTP Archive.
Bot protection adoption increased from 29% of desktop sites and 26% of mobile sites in 2022 to 33% and 32% respectively in 2024, based on The 2024 Web Almanac Security chapter, HTTP Archive.

Structured Data and Schema Statistics

Overall structured data usage grew to 49% of mobile home pages and 48% of desktop home pages in 2024, a slight increase from 47% mobile and 46% desktop in 2022, based on a crawl of 16.9 million websites in The 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
JSON-LD is the most common structured data format, found on 40.5% of desktop pages and 40.4% of mobile pages in 2024, followed by Microdata on 17.4% of desktop and 18.8% of mobile, based on The 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
Only 0.9% of pages had VideoObject structured data markup in 2024, despite video content appearing on a substantially higher share of pages, based on The 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
JSON-LD structured data via the homepage increased from 37% in 2022 to 41% in 2024 on mobile devices, based on trend analysis in KeyStar SEO Agency Schema Statistics.
The majority of sites implement structured data in raw HTML, while only 2% of mobile and desktop home page crawls have structured data added via JavaScript, based on The 2024 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
In 2024, Google updated its search documentation to include the og:title meta tag as a source for generating title links in search results, expanding the SEO significance of Open Graph tags, based on The 2024 Web Almanac Structured Data chapter, HTTP Archive.
og:image was used on 48% of desktop pages in 2024, and the Twitter Card tag was used on 44.15% of mobile pages, based on The 2024 Web Almanac Structured Data chapter, HTTP Archive.

Mobile-First Indexing Statistics

Google completed its transition to mobile-first indexing for all websites in July 2024, meaning every site is now evaluated by mobile Googlebot as the primary crawl, based on confirmed Google documentation cited in WhiteHat SEO Core Web Vitals Guide.
Mobile CWV data affects mobile rankings and desktop CWV data affects desktop rankings independently since Google completed mobile-first indexing, based on confirmed documentation cited in WhiteHat SEO Core Web Vitals Guide.
Smartphones now account for 64.35% of all global website traffic as of 2025, up from 60.61% in Q1 2024, based on StatCounter data compiled by Quantumrun Mobile Website Traffic Statistics.
80.4% of websites are missing alt attributes on images, which can hinder both accessibility and technical SEO, based on data cited in HeavyWeight Digital SEO Statistics 2024.
Multilingual websites with hreflang tags see a 20% improvement in search rankings for targeted regions, based on data cited in PageOptimizer Pro Technical SEO Statistics 2025.
Over 55% of websites lack proper geotargeting signals, based on data cited in PageOptimizer Pro Technical SEO Statistics 2025.

Heading and Page Structure Statistics

H1 tags are present on 71% of desktop pages and 70% of mobile pages in 2025, based on analysis in The 2025 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
H2 tags are the most widely adopted heading element, present on 72% of desktop pages and 71% of mobile pages in 2025, based on The 2025 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
H3 tags are used on 60% of both desktop and mobile pages in 2025, while H4 tags appear on 37% of desktop and 36% of mobile pages, based on The 2025 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
Meta descriptions are present on 67.7% of desktop pages and 67.2% of mobile pages in 2025, based on The 2025 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
The median content length for page meta descriptions is 40 words and 274 characters on both desktop and mobile in 2025, more than double the 2022 median of 19 words and approximately 135 characters, based on The 2025 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
Title tag adoption reached 98.62% of desktop pages and 98.54% of mobile pages in 2025, up slightly from 98.0% and 98.2% in 2024, based on The 2025 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.
Invalid img tags in the head section were found on 27.2% of desktop and 23% of mobile pages in 2025, causing crawlers to miss metadata elements placed further in the head, based on The 2025 Web Almanac SEO chapter, HTTP Archive.

Industry-Specific and AI Impact Statistics

40% of B2B companies say they lack the internal expertise needed to manage technical SEO, based on a survey by Statista, cited in Ahrefs B2B SEO Statistics.
Traditional technical SEO factors (title tags, headings, keyword placement) dropped from 15% to 12% of estimated Google ranking weight between 2024 and 2025, while technical crawlability and performance factors increased from 16% to 18%, based on a study of 10 million search results by Dollarpocket SEO Ranking Factors Study.
97% of sources cited in Google AI Overviews come from the top 20 organic results for a query, meaning improved technical SEO performance feeds a pipeline to AI Overview citation, based on third-party analysis cited in WhiteHat SEO Core Web Vitals and AI Search Guide.
The December 2025 Google core update saw pages with LCP above 3 seconds experience approximately 23% more traffic loss than faster competitors with similar content, based on third-party analyst reporting cited in WhiteHat SEO Core Web Vitals Guide, sourced from Google CrUX analysis.
78% of websites use some form of schema markup as of recent data, based on a study by W3Tech, cited in Ahrefs B2B SEO Statistics.
The global SEO services market is estimated at USD 83.98 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach USD 148.86 billion by 2030, based on market data cited in AIOSEO SEO Statistics for 2026.
Websites with descriptive alt tags and compressed images see a 23% boost in organic traffic, based on data cited in PageOptimizer Pro Technical SEO Statistics 2025.
Image search accounts for 22.6% of all search queries on Google, making image technical optimization a material traffic opportunity, based on data cited in PageOptimizer Pro Technical SEO Statistics 2025.

References

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