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I'm surprised Google allowed this hack. I wonder how long until they fix it?
As Google pushes forward with their new Web Vitals, they left one giant hole in how those are being calculated.
Actual user metrics will likely negate this in search scoring.
Maybe for PageRank. But as long as the Lighthouse score is gameable, we're going to see a lot of web shops use these techniques to appease clients.
That's likely. But even an idiot would likely notice the frames loading.

But this will likely not game PageRank unless for very unpopular sites (which don't have enough actual user metrics).

Google posted an update saying that the problem is restricted to their local tools, and not PageRank, so that's good.

But many places still use PageSpeed, and I wouldn't bet anything vital on clients noticing iframes.

I agree that user metrics should show the inverse. The problem is that Pagespeed and the new Web Vitals are supposed to be a proxy of user metrics.

So business owners will assume that a 100 Pagespeed score actually means a faster website.

If the Pagespeed score doesn't represent the actual experience, then isn't that a failure of it's purpose?