Dwell Time
Dwell time is how long a person stays on a page after clicking through to it from a search results page, measured until they return to the results. It is a search engine’s private observation of its own users, not a number the page owner can see.
Dwell time, bounce rate and time on page
Three measures of the same visit, taken from three vantage points. Bounce rate and time on page come from the site’s own analytics: whether the visitor did anything else, and how long the page was open. Dwell time needs the search engine’s side, because only the search engine knows the visitor came from a result and went back to it. A person who reads a page for four minutes and closes the tab has a long time on page and no dwell time at all, since they never returned. A person who clicks back after ten seconds has a short dwell time, and a site with no analytics installed records nothing about either of them.
What this site does not measure
No search engine publishes dwell time per page, and none documents how, or whether, it uses the figure in ranking, so any claim about its weight is a guess. This site has not measured it and does not report it. Its measurement is of what an assistant writes: whether the business is named in the answer to a question, and how. In an assistant’s answer there is often no click at all, so there is no dwell time to speak of; the page was read by the machine, not the person. Whether the person then visits is a separate question, and one that the site’s own analytics can answer.
A common question
Can a business read its own dwell time out of its analytics reports?
No. The site's analytics can report whether a visitor did anything else and how long the page stayed open, but the return trip to the results page happens on the search engine's side, and only the search engine sees it. That is why a reader who spends four minutes on a page and then closes the tab registers a long time on page and no dwell time at all, while someone who clicks back after ten seconds registers a short one. No engine publishes the figure per page, and none documents how it uses it.
Related terms
Sources
No external source; the definition is stated from mechanism. The limit in the second section is this site’s own.