Back in August, we were told by Google that Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) were going to enter the main mobile search results. Earlier this week, it actually happened. The rollout of AMP in Google’s mobile results will be complete, globally, by the end of the year.
While developers and publishers are being encouraged to use the format by Google, the company is letting everybody know (at least for the time being) that using AMP on your site isn’t going to affect search rankings. Even then, Google is showing AMP-enabled pages when there are two versions of a page available.
With AMP pages, they open and load faster than normal mobile web pages. They will typically load within a second. The scripts and ad units on typical mobile sites will usually cause them to take much longer, causing the experience to be a bit frustrating. I have personally gotten to check out a number of AMP pages, and they are most certainly faster than normal mobile pages, even ones that are mobile-friendly. This is what I found when I did some searches:
Google announced in a blog post that there is over 600 million AMP documents/pages right now, which is a significant jump from the mere 150 million that appeared this summer. The 600 million AMP documents that are online are from a number of countries in over 100 languages. Not only is there pure publishing documents in that number, companies like eBay are using AMP for commerce as well.
AMP is part of a number of initiatives Google is implementing to make the mobile web much more user-friendly.