Google announced major improvements to search speed through strategic implementation of the Speculation Rules API. This initiative aims to enhance the search experience by prefetching and prerendering search results, leading to significant performance gains for users.
Google Search now automatically prefetches the first two search results using speculation rules. The implementation includes privacy-preserving features:
- Uses anonymous-client-ip-when-cross-origin requirement to protect user IP addresses
- Implements strict-origin referrer policy to prevent search URL data leakage
- Automatically disables prefetching when users have existing site cookies
The impact has been notable, with tests showing:
- 67 milliseconds reduction in Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) on Chrome for Android
- 58.6 milliseconds improvement in LCP for desktop Chrome users
Expanded Prefetching Beyond Top Results
Google extended prefetching capabilities beyond the initial two results using the "moderate eagerness" setting. This means:
- Additional search results are prefetched only when users hover over links
- Implementation is selective to avoid unnecessary resource usage
- Desktop Chrome showed 7.6 milliseconds improvement in First Contentful Paint (FCP)
- LCP improved by 9.5 milliseconds for subsequent search results
Browser Support and Availability
The Speculation Rules API is currently available on:
- Chrome (version 109+)
- Edge (version 109+)
Firefox and Safari do not yet support this feature. Google is actively working through the W3C standards process to encourage broader browser adoption.
Future Developments
Google continues to enhance search performance through new implementations:
- Prerendered search results pages for users with preload enabled
- Address bar search query optimization
- Support for other search engines to implement similar features
The private prefetch proxy remains exclusive to Chrome, though Google indicates willingness to expand these improvements to other browsers that implement their own private prefetch proxies in the future.
