Google Expands AMP Project To Main Search Results

by Laurie Sullivan, Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 3, 2016

Google’s move Tuesday expands links to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) beyond a carousel of articles at the top of the search results page to the entire search results page.

Initially, Google had displayed AMP pages in a carousel intended to highlight news articles, while encouraging sites to switch. Now Google counts more than 150 million AMP docs in its index, with more than 4 million new ones added every week.

Having an AMP-enhanced Web site doesn’t improve search rankings, but it does improve the speed in which content loads. On average, AMP sites are four times faster than their mobile counterparts and use 10 times less data.

On average, AMP pages load in less than one second. Some 90% of publishers experience a higher click-through rate, and 80% of AMP publishers experience better ad viewability rates.

Since the majority of use has moved to mobile devices, Google, of course, hopes the shift will keep consumers searching the open Web where it serves paid-search advertisements as opposed to apps such as Bing Search or Facebook.

AMP competes with Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News, and now Google has expanded the project well beyond news into other categories such as query results and ecommerce, and ads.

U.S. retail sales should increase 2.6% in 2016, up from 1.4% growth in 2015, according to a recent eMarketer report. The analyst firm forecasts U.S. retail ecommerce sales will grow 15.7% in 2016, the highest annual increase since 2011. By 2018, ecommerce will surpass 10% of total retail sales in the U.S., per eMarketer.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

(14)