Google’s AMP rich cards look like they should work. The format is visually appealing, and AMP rich card carousels usually appear at the top of mobile search results, dominating the first viewport.
They also provide a brand showcase publishers should love.
AMP “Top Stories” scrolling rich card carousel in Google mobile search
But recently, publishers have been scratching their heads over analytics indicating AMP content has a lower click-through rate from rich cards than from general search results. They’re finding this data in Google Search Console (GSC), which now allows publishers to filter AMP performance in search based on appearance as rich cards in a carousel vs. non-rich text links.
Here’s the GSC dashboard for an aggregated group of news publishers, showing an average CTR of 3.14 percent for AMP rich results vs. 4.39 percent for AMP non-rich results, even though the rich results have a higher average position.
Google Search Console rich vs. non-rich performance for an aggregated group of news publishers with a total of 235 million AMP search impressions and 8.9 million AMP clicks
These numbers are perplexing at first — but, if we dig in, they begin to make sense.
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