Lighthouse Performance of 1,210 Vibe-Coded Project Pages
78.3% of 1,210 measured VCL project pages scored below Lighthouse’s Good threshold. A desktop lab benchmark, not a verdict on every app or its real-world users.
948 of 1,210 measured public project pages—78.3%—scored below 90 in Lighthouse performance in VCL’s September report. The median score was 65.
Most measured pages therefore fell short of Lighthouse’s “Good” band. But “below Good” is not synonymous with “Poor”: the largest group scored between 50 and 89.
Three score bands, three different results
| Lighthouse performance score | Project pages | Share of 1,210 measured pages |
|---|---|---|
| 0–49: Poor | 344 | 28.4% |
| 50–89: Needs Improvement | 604 | 49.9% |
| 90–100: Good | 262 | 21.7% |
These bands follow Lighthouse’s published scoring definitions. The 78.3% finding combines the first two groups: 344 plus 604 pages. It should not be reported as the percentage of “broken apps.”
Measurements were available for 1,210 of the 1,254 project URLs in the report. The other 44 were not assigned a score of zero or counted as Poor.
What was actually tested
Each result is a single desktop lab run against the submitted public page, using the latest successful recorded measurement at or before the cutoff. If a project submitted an app-store or marketplace listing, the score describes that listing page—not the application behind it.
This is not a Core Web Vitals field assessment, a mobile-user study or a test of every authenticated screen in a product. Lighthouse scores can also vary with test conditions. Historical runtime-version records are incomplete, so the edition preserves the recorded results without claiming exact reproduction of every run.
The sample consists of VCL-listed projects, with no matched non-AI-built control group. It therefore cannot establish that AI coding caused the observed scores or that one coding assistant produces faster websites than another.
What it does provide is a concrete public-page benchmark: 262 measured pages reached the Good band, while 948 did not under the recorded desktop tests.
Data and source. State of Vibe Coding 2026, Dataset v7: Lighthouse performance, cutoff September 11, 2026 at 09:40:56 UTC. See the edition’s methodology for scanner settings and submitted-page scope.
The full State of Vibe Coding report presents this measure separately from search visibility and agent readiness.