AMP
Also called: accelerated mobile pages
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open-source HTML framework, launched by Google in 2015, for building fast-loading mobile pages using restricted HTML, a managed JavaScript library, and Google-served caches. Since Google's 2021 Page Experience update, AMP carries no ranking or Top Stories advantage.
Why AMP lost its edge
AMP has three parts: AMP HTML (standard markup limited to a fixed set of web components, with slow tags banned), AMP JS (a library that manages resource loading and blocks render-blocking scripts), and the AMP Cache (Google validates the page and serves a cached copy from its own infrastructure). That cache is why AMP results often loaded near-instantly and showed URLs like google.com/amp/....
For years, AMP was the price of entry to the mobile Top Stories carousel, so publishers maintained parallel AMP versions of every article. That ended with the June 2021 Page Experience update. Google dropped the AMP requirement for Top Stories, removed the lightning-bolt badge, and shifted to Core Web Vitals as the signal that counts. Google now states it indexes AMP pages “just like other web pages, and applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used.”
The practical picture in 2026: AMP is optional and fading. It still works, and Google still documents it, but there is no ranking bonus, and keeping a separate AMP copy of every page is ongoing overhead. Most teams reach the same speed with responsive design plus targeted Core Web Vitals work, on one URL instead of two.
How it affects your traffic
If you still run AMP, the exposure is quiet drift: two versions of every page to keep in sync, canonical tags that can break, and a second URL that can serve stale content to crawlers and AI answer engines. If you dropped AMP or never adopted it, the speed work now lives on the canonical page itself (LCP, INP, CLS). Our Technical SEO service audits whether AMP is still earning its keep, fixes the canonical and Core Web Vitals issues underneath, and consolidates to one fast, valid URL so search and AI see a single clean source.
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