Does intrusive interstitial advice still apply, or did it relax?
- Published November 6, 2026
- Linked from 1 answer
- In a cluster of 8
The advice still applies; what changed is how Google describes its role in ranking. Google’s current guidance on avoiding intrusive interstitials still asks sites not to obscure the entire page and to use banners that take up a small fraction of the screen instead. In April 2023, Google’s post on page experience stopped presenting a fixed list of page experience signals, of which “no intrusive interstitials” had been one, and said: “While not all of these may be directly used to inform ranking, we do find that all of these aspects of page experience align with success in search ranking, and are worth attention.”
What changed and what did not
| Before April 2023 | Since |
|---|---|
| Intrusive interstitials were listed as one of the page experience signals | No fixed signal list; page experience described as aspects that align with ranking success |
| The "page experience update" was talked about as if it were a ranking system | Google says it was not a separate ranking system |
| The guidance: avoid covering the page | The same guidance, still published |
Whether interstitials are a direct ranking input today is not something Google states either way. What it does state is that they work against a good page experience and that it recommends avoiding them.
What the guidance covers
- Avoid: popups that cover the main content right after a visitor arrives from search, standalone interstitials the visitor has to dismiss before reaching the content, and layouts where the content is pushed below a full-screen block.
- Acceptable: dialogs that the law requires, which the guidance exempts, and small banners that leave the content readable.
Check your own popups
- Load the page on a phone from a search result and see what appears first.
- If anything covers the content before the visitor can read it, replace it with a banner or an inline block.
- Keep legally required dialogs, and make them as small as the requirement allows.
Ads and popups also touch speed, and the two effects are weighed together in whether removing ads to improve speed pays off. Treat the guidance as current, whatever weight ranking gives it, because the visitor arriving from search still meets the popup first.
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