Media websites and publishers should stop asking marketers to optimise for dwell time and instead shift the conversation towards duration and meaningful audience attention.
For years, dwell time has been used as a proxy for content quality in digital publishing. It describes the time between a user clicking through from search and returning to the search results. In theory, a longer dwell time suggested strong engagement, while a short visit implied the content had failed to meet expectations.
For media organisations, however, this interpretation is increasingly outdated. Readers rarely behave in such a linear way. They open multiple articles in different tabs, switch between devices, or simply close a page once they have consumed the information they need. In many cases, they may read a full article, take action, or share it without ever returning to the search results page.
As a result, dwell time is often an incomplete and sometimes misleading indicator of editorial performance. It is also not a metric that most media publishers can reliably control or consistently measure across platforms.
The shift in search behaviour has made this even more important. AI-generated summaries, news aggregators and zero-click results are reducing the volume of traditional search traffic.
For media websites, this means success can no longer be defined purely by search behaviour, but must instead be understood across all channels, including direct readership, newsletters, social platforms and referral traffic.
This is why marketers working with media brands should now be asking for duration rather than dwell time. Duration—particularly average engagement duration—provides a more accurate reflection of how long audiences are actively consuming content. Tools such as Google Analytics 4 measure this as time spent with the page in focus, rather than passive time in the background.
For media publishers, this shift is already proving valuable. For example, www.glazingtoday.com now uses average engagement duration as a core performance metric, with over 100 seconds of active attention now considered a standard benchmark across the site. This provides a clearer and more commercially relevant understanding of how deeply readers are engaging with editorial content.
Duration data becomes even more powerful when combined with behavioural signals. Scroll depth, article completion rates, video engagement, internal link clicks, newsletter sign-ups and advertising interactions all help to show whether readers are not just arriving, but actually consuming and responding to content.
A media site achieving an average engagement duration of 100 seconds is capturing more than a minute and a half of active attention per visit. In publishing terms, this is a strong indicator of editorial relevance and audience interest, particularly when supported by repeat readership, subscription growth or advertising performance. However, it should always be benchmarked across content categories, traffic sources and time periods to provide meaningful insight.
Dwell time still has a place in understanding search behaviour, but it is no longer sufficient for media organisations trying to measure real audience value. The more important question for publishers and marketers alike is no longer how quickly someone returned to search, but how long they stayed, how deeply they engaged, and whether the content created a lasting connection with the reader.
