After a six-month testing period focused exclusively on news stories in mobile search results, Google has officially expanded its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project to various other mobile sites. And just this past month, it opened the “AMP firehouse”—at least according to the popular blog Search Engine Land.
Back in August, the tech giant launched a demo website that allowed users to test out the AMP experience, while giving developers an opportunity to make changes to AMP support for their sites before it becomes available to all. Among the sites with AMP pages are Reddit, TripAdvisor, Disney, the National Football League and Squarespace, among many others.
Then, in September, the so-called “blue links” rollout furthered this open-source approach to improving the AMP project. Once this phase is complete, Google will begin always showing mobile users a validated AMP version of webpages rather than the usual link.
For those engaged in content creation, the expansion will provide opportunities to bring to the surface quality and informative evergreen content that offers value to readers—and that would previously only be available in regular search results.
Changing the mobile content experience
Within the first six months of the project, Google had already logged 150 million AMP documents from more than 650,000 domains. A number of non-news producing sites had already adopted the AMP format—even though the pages have not yet been made available for widespread use.
The benefits of AMPs is becoming clear, as these pages load about four times faster than other pages, with median load times at less than one second. It also appears that having AMP pages will not impact a website’s search rankings—for better or worse. However, preliminary data shows that searchers are more likely to click on these pages compared to other types of results, and the ads on AMP pages load faster and tend to be less intrusive.
At this point, it’s difficult for marketers to truly understand how they will need to use AMPs in their content creation strategies moving forward. However, what is clear is that this is very likely to have an impact on how we create digital content in the very near future—and how brands set themselves apart in an effort to get mobile users to click on their AMP links.