Has Google Killed AMP?

In an update posted in May of last year, Google unveiled some major news for their search algorithm. The update included news about the future AMP, the mobile‑focused framework developed by Google to compete with optimisation technologies being developed by big‑name competitors like Facebook.

In the update, Google confirmed that they would be changing the requirements that a page must meet to be featured in the "Top Stories" section of the search results page. Previously these requirements had heavily favoured websites that implemented and used AMP, elevating these above non‑AMP competitors; going forward their updated requirements would do away with this condition, focusing more on content and allowing results built without AMP.

AMP has always split opinions, and the original decision to give preferential treatment to sites that use their product could be seen as anti‑competitive, but for many, this was seen as very good news indeed.

Google chose to delay the release of the updates to the algorithm due to the ongoing Covid‑19 pandemic, and has settled into a gradual rollout for at least some aspects of the news that they had posted last year.

The Future of AMP

Since the challenge of having your site or article feature in the 'Top Stories' section is no longer intrinsically tied to using ‑ and building with ‑ Google AMP, will developers or website owners bother with it at all going forwards?

It is fair to say that the AMP framework never really found its feet nor much popularity with the wider web development community; it was (and still is) not particularly well‑suited to anything aside from news sites, and in my experience really performed particularly poorly when it came to e‑commerce or brochure‑type websites. Combine that too with a janky, unintuitive, and unnecessary complex build experience, it turned off both the developers who were tasked with implementing it, and the website owners who were the eventual target audience.

Piling on top of the nuisance of being an additional consideration for development at the start of a project, building a site with AMP also means maintaining two disparate versions of each site ‑‑ adding time, effort and budget to every project.

In defence, AMP does provide some benefits in terms of speed which comes mostly thanks to Google pre‑caching pages built with it. Given how important speed is as a ranking factor, it is fair to expect that anything using AMP will continue to benefit from a better ranking position compared to slower competitors. As the playing‑field levels though, advances in development like using static site generators alongside headless CMSes ‑ which are inherently very, very fast ‑ will likely see sites ranking purely on their AMP‑acquired speed dropping down the results pages.

However, with this update, Google is also placing a larger focus on Page Experience so overall it is hard to say whether the additional money, time and development effort that goes into building with AMP is worth it any longer.

There are easier, faster and more maintainable methods to optimise a website with, including simple caching plugins if you're running a CMS, npm and yarn packages that can be used to automatically minify and compile your code (an important step in optimisation that many seem to miss), and CDNs that can cache your application and deliver your site to your visitor from the best and geographically closest servers ‑‑ and these methods work for every site, not just sites that put out content in a specific way.

Ultimately, whilst AMP was never specifically a ranking factor in and of itself (as Google themselves officially stated back in 2016), the fact that it was a barrier for entry to the "Top Stories" section on the search results page was a big deal. It is a very visible section with a lot of priority, and no doubt made a huge difference to the click‑through rates of sites lucky enough to have their results appear in there.

Now that AMP is no longer a requirement for that section, it's hard to find many benefits for AMP given the drawbacks that come with it. Personally, I've steered clients away from AMP for several years now: the pay‑off between focusing that budget on optimising the site for everybody, versus doubling maintenance tasks and implementing AMP, is hard to ignore ‑ even for the most hard‑nosed web protagonist!