Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. My name is Clarisse Treillesand today I explain to you why Google’s AMP format inevitably declines.
These three letters, “AMP”, may not speak to you, but you have surely come across them without even knowing it in your online searches. This acronym – for “Accelerated Mobile Pages” – refers to a format for displaying web pages on mobile deployed by Google since 2016.
Originally intended to improve the mobile experience by reducing page loading time, this format is now being questioned. Its first customers, press publishers, simply turned their backs on it after a series of technical reversals imposed by Google, which obviously did not have good press.
Publishers, the first concerned
Initially, AMP was quickly adopted by many news publishers. Several reasons explain this movement: on the one hand, the growing importance of consulting websites via mobile and the economic interest behind this renewed audience, and on the other hand, the SEO advantages offered by this format. , since Google Search for a time exclusively featured these AMP formats in its coveted carousel.
Not to mention that publishers’ interest in AMP increased when Google gave a premium to the loading speed in the ranking of search results.
At the end of 2020, nearly 90% of French press publishers were using AMP. But it is clear that this hype was short-lived, since more and more publishers are now abandoning this format.
Unpopular Rules
One of the main reasons for this reversal is Google’s decision in 2021 to stop granting carousel exclusivity to content displayed in AMP format.
Other unpopular technical changes followed. For example, the restrictions imposed in the AMP development rules have made user tracking more complex to implement on the publisher side, ultimately impacting their advertising revenues.
The systematic use of a Google cache server also raises questions. Via its cache servers, Google becomes the content provider, which has the effect of further limiting the tracking of Internet users for publishers. Publishers technically become third parties on their own content.
Sailors as unhappy
Press publishers are far from the only Internet players to disengage from AMP.
As proof, Twitter no longer supports redirects to AMP pages since November 2021, as recalled by PEReN, the center of expertise for digital regulation, in a recent report on the subject.
More recently, Brave and DuckDuckGo browsers chose to redirect AMP pages to original non-AMP pages. And many extensions also allow bypassing the technology on all browsers.