AMP & Search

[jorydotcom]

Potential Topic Areas

• AMP adoption now that it's not required for publishers to be in mobile search carousel
• From May 2021, measure adoption impact of Google Search no longer forcing publications to use AMP to appear in its Top Stories carousel.
• NB, AMP still a ‘shortcut’ to Google Discover success.
• Amp as a set of components / Bento
• AMP dev surveys could help here. Do we have the results?
• AMP Roadmap
• Digging deeper:
  • AMP’s future
  • One thing which this brings up is making sure there's a good end-of-life process for AMP pages. Both the cache and for publishers. “Don’t break the Web!”
  • NB, there’s a soon-to-ship feature which enables sites to opt-out of caching, without invalidating their page(s).
• Related issues from 2020:
  • #80 Trade-off Triangle: Perf Index-Consistency-UX
  • #87 AMP performance numbers outside Google search
  • #124 Work with Google to document how upcoming Search ranking changes affect AMP content

[tobie]

• Clarity. Now that AMP is no longer privileged, and perf is privileged instead, what's the reason to pick AMP instead?
• Do we combine this with the marketing/focus? +1
• This is more existential.

[adactio]

Just to share my thoughts on why this is a bit of an existential question about what AMP is...

There's always been a bit of a duality to AMP:

• There's AMP, a collection of web components.
• There's AMP, a format that has validation rules (and uses the collection of web components).

In the past, the use-case for having a separate AMP page (i.e. using the AMP format and validating against it) was pretty clear: it was the only way of appearing in the top stories carousel in Google search. Now that this privilege is being removed (any sufficiently performant page will be eligible for inclusion from May), it raises the question of whether there is any incentive for publishers to use AMP the format.

Note this is different from asking whether there's any incentive for developers to use AMP at all, as long as the word "AMP" is being used to refer to the collection of web components.

The confusion between these two definitions of AMP is rife throughout the project. The repo for amphtml, which bills itself as "The AMP web component framework" is actually a repo for the AMP format: building pages with the AMP doctype and validating against a set of rules.