Dwell time is not a confirmed, optimizable ranking factor, and there is no “dwell time” metric you can find, target, or tune. Google has never confirmed it as a direct factor, and no dial in any tool reports the number search engines supposedly read, so the popular advice to “increase dwell time to rank” points at a control that does not exist. The honest verdict sits between two louder claims, and it refuses both of them.
It refuses the overclaim first. Plenty of SEO writing treats dwell time as an established factor with a target you should hit, as if there were a stopwatch you could optimize against. There is not. You cannot see what Google measures here, you cannot confirm it measures this specific thing, and you certainly cannot find a published threshold to aim for. Any page promising a dwell-time number to chase is selling a metric that was never on offer.
It also refuses the flat denial. It would be just as wrong to insist Google ignores how people behave entirely. Search engines very likely use some user-behavior signals in aggregate as part of how they evaluate results, but the specifics, what exactly is measured, how much it weighs, whether anything resembling time-on-page is in the mix, are unconfirmed. Because this sits in unconfirmed territory and Google’s behavior here can shift, treat the whole area as current understanding worth confirming rather than fact, and resist anyone who states the mechanics with false precision. The truthful position is simply that something behavioral may matter, but no specific, optimizable dwell metric is known.
So write for genuine engagement instead of a phantom number. Make the page answer the query so well that people actually stay and read because it is worth reading, not because you are gaming a stopwatch you cannot see. That real satisfaction is the only thing under your control, it produces whatever behavioral signals do matter as a byproduct, and it does not depend on a dwell-time metric that was never real to begin with.