Site Engagement Score
Chrome's internal 0–100 per-domain user engagement metric, built from navigation events, input interactions, and media consumption, decaying over time when a site is not visited.
Deep inside your Chrome browser, a quiet metric is tracking how you interact with every website you visit. It is called the Site Engagement Score, and it rates your relationship with a domain on a scale from zero to one hundred.
This score is entirely private. It is computed and stored locally on your device, and is never sent to a server. You earn points for a site through simple daily habits, like navigating to a page, clicking, typing, or even just letting media play in the background. The browser caps your daily points at fifteen, and if you stop visiting a site, your score slowly decays over time.
So why does this matter? While it is not a traditional search engine ranking factor, the Site Engagement Score is a powerful signal of user trust and loyalty. A high score tells Chrome that you value a domain. In response, the browser is more likely to grant that site notification permissions, recommend it in content feeds, or promote it as a web app.
As search evolves, this local data is becoming even more important. Chrome’s on-device artificial intelligence models can use these engagement scores to understand which sites you trust most, helping the AI personalize its responses based on your actual browsing habits.
If you want to see how Chrome views your own habits, you can inspect your live scores at any time. Just type chrome, followed by a colon, two forward slashes, and site-engagement into your address bar to see exactly which domains you visit the most.
What the Site Engagement Score is
The Site Engagement Score is a per-origin metric computed by Chrome and stored locally in the browser. It measures how meaningfully a user interacts with a given domain over time, on a scale from 0 to 100. The score is not reported to any server — it lives only on the device — but it influences browser-side behaviours including notification permission decisions, Progressive Web App promotion, and content recommendations.
How it is calculated
Chrome accumulates points from specific interaction events. A navigation to the site adds 1.5 points; user input (clicks, keystrokes) adds 0.6 points per event; visible media playing adds 0.06 points per interval; hidden media adds 0.01. The first engagement of each day with a site earns a 1.5-point bonus. A web app installed as a shortcut earns 5 points when launched. The score is capped at a maximum of 15 points per day and decays proportionally (by a factor of 0.984 per two-hour period) when the site is not visited, dropping below 0.5 triggers cleanup.
Why it matters for SEO
The Site Engagement Score is a transparent, non-keyword signal of how much a browser trusts and habitually uses a domain. Sites with high scores are more likely to receive notification permission grants, be promoted as Progressive Web Apps, and appear in browser-native recommendation surfaces. More broadly, it is a proxy for what traditional SEO calls branded demand and returning visitor behaviour — signals that are increasingly relevant as AI systems use on-device context to personalise their responses. Chrome's on-device AI models, including its on-device models, have access to engagement metadata when assembling context for the active page.
Accessing your score
Any Chrome user can inspect per-domain engagement scores by navigating to chrome://site-engagement/. The scores are live and update in real time as the browser records interactions.