Speculation Rules API uses 'eager' prefetch (excessive)

The Speculation Rules API is a browser feature that lets a site prefetch or prerender pages a visitor is likely to click next, making navigation feel instant. This site uses it, but with an "eager" setting, which triggers a prefetch on every link the moment a visitor's cursor hovers or finger touches it, rather than only for likely next clicks. Eager prefetching wastes visitor bandwidth and server resources on pages that are never actually visited, inflates analytics with page loads that were never real visits, and adds unnecessary load to your server on every page that has links visitors can hover or touch. Your developer should change the eagerness setting to "moderate", which prefetches only on a plausible navigation, or "conservative", which waits until the visitor actually presses down on the link. Google's 2026 guidance recommends moving away from eager. This is a small configuration change, about fifteen minutes.