Google’s AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, is a breakthrough in mobile browsing that slims down pages and allows them to load up to four times quicker and use up to four times less data when doing so. Not long ago, Google rolled the service out for a few select search results related to news articles. The publisher or webmaster had to adopt AMP on their end, and Google would feature AMP-optimized results in a special column all on their own. News articles tend to be less resource-heavy than other websites, so they made sense as the initial candidate for AMP to test the technology before it rolled out to a wider gamut of sites and results. Now, it seems that AMP’s time has come, and Google is opening the floodgates for webmasters and publishers on a large and growing list of websites to produce AMP content.
AMP pages of any sort will be specially marked, though for now, only news results will be featured in their own column. Instead, results will appear as normal, except they will be marked ‘AMP’ and bear a small watermark. This will denote an AMP-optimized result, and according to Google’s studies, this watermark will be quite likely to draw more traffic to a given result than it would otherwise get. AMP Project Manager Rudy Galfi pointed out the data, saying that users tended to prefer AMP pages when they were available, since they would load faster, and speed is becoming paramount to the mobile experience these days.
Already, AMP pages are being produced, accepted, and indexed into Google’s search results across roughly 700,000 domains, totaling about 600 million pages and documents so far. That number, of course, will only grow. With AMP set to drive mobile traffic, even competitors are getting in on the action; Microsoft, for instance, is rolling out support for AMP search results in the mobile versions of their Bing search engine. While AMP is still in its early stages, the startling growth from about 150 million indexed pages in July to over 600 million now should serve as a pretty good sign for the up and coming technology, and as a cue for webmasters and web developers to get on board and start producing mobile optimized pages.