What is Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)?
AMP is a restricted dialect of HTML. Pages built with it use a limited set of components, a strict size budget for styles and no custom JavaScript, and in return they load extremely fast and can be served from Google's cache rather than your own server. It launched in 2015 as a response to slow, ad-heavy mobile news sites, and for several years an AMP version of an article was the price of entry to the Top Stories carousel on Google's mobile results.
That requirement ended in 2021, when Google replaced it with the page experience signals (Core Web Vitals) and let any fast page qualify. AMP still exists, still works and still powers things like interactive email and web stories, but it is no longer the shortcut it once was.
Why it matters
Why AMP matters
It matters as history and as a warning. AMP taught the industry how fast a mobile page could be when you removed everything that was not the content, and that lesson survived the framework. Core Web Vitals are, in effect, the discipline of AMP applied to the whole web without the lock-in.
It also showed the cost of building for a platform's rules rather than your own. Publishers maintained two versions of every page, lost their own analytics and branding on cached copies, and watched Google's URL appear in the address bar instead of their own. For a brand that trades on its identity, the trade was never comfortable.
In practice
How AMP works in practice
- 01
An AMP page is a parallel version of a canonical page, linked to it with a rel tag in both directions so search engines know they are the same content. It is written in AMP HTML, validated with Google's tooling, and served either from your own domain or from the AMP cache. Most content management systems offer it through a plugin that generates the AMP copy automatically, with limited control over layout.
- 02
Today the practical question is whether to keep it. Sites that built AMP for Top Stories can usually retire it, redirect the AMP URLs to the canonical pages and invest the effort in making the main site pass Core Web Vitals instead. Sites that never adopted it have no reason to start, and a brand site built around film and imagery would lose more in design control than it gained in speed.
Watch out
What people get wrong about AMP
Believing it is still required for mobile ranking. It is not, and has not been for years. The second misconception is that AMP equals fast: it is one way to be fast, with a cost in design freedom, and a well-built responsive page with lean code and a CDN can match it while keeping your brand intact.
Keeping a half-maintained AMP version alive. An AMP page that drifts out of sync with the canonical, with broken components and missing imagery, is worse than no AMP page at all. Either maintain it properly or retire it cleanly.
