What is a Web Story?
A Web Story is Google's name for a tap-through, full-screen visual story published on the open web. Like the stories format on Instagram or Snapchat, it is a sequence of pages, each combining images, video, short text and animation, that a reader taps through on a phone. The difference is where it lives: a Web Story is a page on the publisher's own website, with its own URL, which means it can be indexed, linked to and shown in Google Search and Google Discover.
The format began as AMP Stories in 2018 and was renamed Web Stories in 2020. Tools such as Google's Web Stories plugin for WordPress let teams build them without writing code, and the stories can carry links, ads and analytics like any other page. Publishers adopted the format first; brands followed with product guides, recipes and lookbooks.
Why it matters
Why Web Stories matter
Stories are the most familiar mobile format there is, but on social platforms they disappear after a day and belong to the platform. Web Stories give publishers and brands the same immersive, visual format on their own site, permanently, with the traffic, the analytics and any advertising revenue staying with them. For visual subjects such as travel, recipes, style and how-tos, they can reach readers through Discover who would never have searched for the topic.
They also repurpose existing content well. A strong article, a photo series or a film can become a story with a fraction of the original effort, which makes them a low-cost way to extend the life of work a brand has already paid for.
In practice
How Web Stories work in practice
- 01
The team chooses a subject suited to visual, step-by-step storytelling, then plans the pages: Google's guidance suggests roughly five to thirty, each with one idea, a strong image or short video, and very little text. They are designed vertically for a phone, with type kept clear of the top and bottom edges, and built in a Web Stories editor that outputs valid code.
- 02
Each story gets a title, a description, a poster image and structured data, links to the deeper article or product page, and a link from the main site so it can be found. Real text on each page, rather than words baked into images, helps both accessibility and search. Performance is tracked like any other page. Google has changed how prominently it shows Web Stories more than once, so treat them as a channel to test rather than one to bet everything on.
Watch out
What people get wrong about Web Stories
Treating them like social stories that vanish. Web Stories are pages, so they need the same care over titles, metadata and accuracy as any article. The other mistake is overloading each page with text. If a page cannot be understood in a few seconds, the reader taps straight past it. A third is publishing a story with nowhere to go: the last page should always lead somewhere useful.
