There are over 150 million Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) in Google’s index from 650 thousand unique domains. Only a fraction of those AMPs ever get found by searchers because, until now, the only way for AMPs to get surfaced in search results was through the “Top Stories” carousel.
Today, Google is unveiling an early preview of expanded AMP support across the entire search results pages. This means you will start to see AMPs surfaced in the blue links alongside other non-AMP pages. You will be able to tell the difference because AMPs will be designated by the familiar lightning bolt icon.
There’s a live demo which you can try for yourself by navigating to the demo site. Within the demo, you can try searching for virtually anything to see how AMP can provide a faster searching and reading experience on the mobile web.
Google emphasizes that this is not intended to lead to a ranking change for sites. Pages will still be ranked as they normally would in search results, while Google highlights which pages provide a faster end-to-end user experience.
It’s also an opportunity for publishers to get their AMP content seen by more people. News publishers were able to blaze a trail for how AMP HTML could impact speed on mobile devices, and now e-commerce sites appear to be the next in line.
Ebay alone has up to 8 million AMPs, but the likelihood of an eBay product page ever showing up in the “Top Stories” carousel is extremely low. The same goes for pages from Disney, Genius, and Reddit — all of which have embraced AMP.
Initially designed for the news industry, AMPs are now being published by e-commerce, entertainment, travel, and recipe sites to the tune of 4.2 million AMPs per week.
Question & Answer Time
Any shakeup to organic search results, inclusion of AMPs notwithstanding, is bound to be followed by a few or more questions. I recently had the opportunity to speak with David “Bez” Besbris, VP of Search at Google, about these latest developments in AMP.
The first thing I wanted to know was, when can we expect this update to roll out in live search results for all users?. In no uncertain terms, Besbris said it all depends on the feedback received by developers. Google would like to see this rolled out to everyone reasonably fast.
Will the “Top Stories” AMP carousel be phased out at any point in favor of this new way of indexing AMPs? Besbris says that’s highly unlikely. Google is quite happy with the carousel being there, especially when it comes to making comparisons in certain use cases.
Will there be any additional work required by developers? Besbris says there’s nothing else required by web developers to get AMP pages indexed in organic search, provided they’ve already adopted AMP technology for their content.
Knowing that many website owners still aren’t sure whether or not to utilize AMP technology, I couldn’t help but take the opportunity to ask Besbris what advice he has for site owners who are still on the fence.
Besbris’ message to site owners is that they should focus on creating great content with a unique voice no matter how it’s being published. It’s also important to optimize your site for speed in other ways than just AMP, but AMP is a great turn-key solution if you just want to have screaming fast content out the gate.
It’s never been a better time to be an AMP publisher, because Google will now start sending traffic to AMP pages through blue link organic search results.
When it comes to the future of AMP, all metrics are growing and Google is poised for a global adoption. Given how much AMP adoption has increased in a short time, Google expects it to be rolled out to all locations soon. Google’s mission is to keep making the web faster and faster over time.
