Definition

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open-source HTML framework — a restricted subset of HTML plus a runtime — designed to make web pages, particularly mobile pages, render quickly. Pages following the AMP spec also serve as standalone web pages.

Google announced AMP in 2015 and used it as a requirement for the Top Stories carousel; that requirement was dropped in 2021 with the page-experience update, after which any sufficiently fast page became eligible. AMP is no longer prioritised in Google Search and Google has scaled back support for some AMP-specific surfaces, though AMP itself remains a maintained open-source project. Sites adopting AMP today usually do so for the framework's performance defaults rather than any Google-specific search advantage.

Examples

• Pre- and post-2021 Top Stories

  A news publisher serves both `/article` and `/amp/article` versions of every story, marked up with `<link rel="amphtml">`. Pre-2021, only the AMP version was eligible for the Top Stories carousel; from 2021 onward Google ranks whichever version performs better on Core Web Vitals and other signals.

Sources

• Google Search Central — AMP on Google Search

Related terms

• Page Experience
  Google's umbrella term for signals describing how users perceive a page — Core Web Vitals, HTTPS, mobile usability, and absence of intrusive interstitials.
• Core Web Vitals
  A set of three Google metrics that measure real-world page experience: loading speed, interactivity and visual stability.
• Mobile-First Indexing
  Google's practice of using the mobile version of a site as the primary basis for indexing and ranking.

Where QueryCatch uses this

• Page Optimisation