Google told us in August that Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) would be entering the main mobile search results. That happened earlier this week, and the rollout will be complete, globally, by the end of the year.
While Google encourages developers and publishers to use the format, the company has made clear (at least for now) that AMPlification won’t affect search rankings. Despite this, Google prefers and will show AMP-enabled pages when there are two versions of a page available.
AMP pages open and load much faster than conventional mobile web pages, generally in under a second. The scripts and ad units on traditional mobile sites can cause pages to take much longer to load and often create a poor and frustrating user experience. (I’m tempted to call this “page rage.”)
Google announced in a blog post that there are in excess of 600 million AMP documents/pages, up from 150 million this summer. These documents are from numerous countries in more than 100 languages. In addition, beyond pure content publishing, companies such as eBay are using AMP for commerce.
AMP is part of multiple initiatives Google is implementing to make the mobile web more user-friendly. While the mobile web has much greater reach than apps, users spend the vast majority of their mobile media time (nearly 90 percent) within their favorite apps.
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