Cloudflare has introduced BEACON, an anonymized public dataset containing billions of real-world web performance measurements gathered from 10,000 of the largest websites on its network, according to a company announcement on September 28, 2026.
What the Dataset Covers
BEACON expands the footprint of the community-led RUM Archive project 100-fold and is updated daily in Google BigQuery. It reports full histograms for Core Web Vitals including Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Interaction to Next Paint. By publishing full histograms rather than single averages like the 75th percentile, the dataset allows researchers to examine long-tail performance and industry-wide bottlenecks across major browser engines, devices, and countries.
Performance Findings and Geographic Disparities
According to the telemetry data, WebKit generally performs best on overall metrics, but that advantage is not universal. In 46 countries where WebKit accounts for more than 10 percent of traffic, its load time or interaction responsiveness metrics are at least 10 percent worse than Blink-based browsers such as Chrome, Edge, and Opera. Furthermore, industry classifications reveal that Government and Politics, Health, and Safe for Kids categories perform best, while Ads, Religion, and Weather rank lowest.
Analyzing Sub-Parts and Architecture Tradeoffs
The dataset extends standard monitoring by breaking down Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint into granular sub-parts to separate loading and response stages. Additionally, BEACON supports Google Chrome's Soft Navigations API for single-page applications built with frameworks like React, Vue, Angular, and Svelte. The data shows soft navigations render two to three times faster than hard navigations, though teams must weigh these gains against potentially heavier initial landing page loads.
Privacy, Normalization, and Access
To protect privacy and prevent individual site identification, Cloudflare strips out domain names and URL paths, normalizes data volume across the 10,000 selected sites, and discards records with fewer than five data points. The resulting dataset is publicly accessible on Google BigQuery alongside pre-written queries for customized analysis, with plans to integrate the telemetry into Cloudflare Radar's upcoming Web Performance section.
AI-generated editorial illustration; not a documentary photograph.
Source: How fast is the web? Explore billions of real-user measurements with BEACON
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