the.com/dwell time
the pause before the click that says more about you than the click ever will.
means the length of time someone spends on a page or result before returning to search or clicking away, used as a silent vote on how good that content actually was.
from borrowed from military and radar jargon, where dwell time meant how long a sensor lingered on a target before moving on; search engineers repurposed it in the 2000s to measure how long attention lingers on a webpage before bouncing.
not bounce ratebounce rate ignores time, dwell time weighs it
google denialgoogle publicly denies using it as a ranking signal
real estate tooin property, it means days a listing sits unsold
long is ambiguouscould mean loved content or hopeless confusion
for instance
wikipedia articles — famous for absurdly long dwell times via rabbit-hole reading
recipe blogs — engineered with life stories to inflate dwell time before the recipe
amazon product pages — tracked internally to judge listing quality and buyer intent