Cloudflare Publishes BEACON Dataset: Billions of Web Performance Measurements from 10,000 Sites

Cloudflare has released BEACON (Browser Experience Across Cloudflare's Observed Network), an open dataset built from billions of real-world performance measurements across 10,000 of the largest websites on its network. Updated daily in Google BigQuery, the dataset uses standards from the community-led RUM Archive and covers all major browser engines. BEACON reports Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP) as full histograms, allowing researchers to analyze long-tail performance rather than just averages. The data reveals that while WebKit generally performs best, it is at least 10% slower than Blink-based browsers in 46 countries where it holds over 10% traffic share. The dataset also breaks down LCP and INP into sub-parts, showing that resource discovery and render blocking are often larger bottlenecks than download times. Additionally, BEACON supports Google Chrome’s Soft Navigations API, revealing that client-side navigations in single-page applications are two to three times faster than hard navigations. Privacy is ensured by stripping customer identifiers and discarding aggregated records with fewer than five data points. The project was developed with significant contributions from Cloudflare’s 1,111 intern project.