10 Years Ago This Week: AMP to improve the mobile web

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week of October 10, 2015.

10 years ago this week Google launched the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, meant to replace the slow mobile web pages in mobile Search results.

"Beautiful" articles on mobile devices

AMP-formatted articles in the Top Stories carousel in mobile Google Search results. (Source)

In 2015 people were increasingly consuming news and other content on their mobile devices. But the mobile web "sucked" (to put it bluntly), and it was a nicer user experience to use a dedicated publisher or social media app. 

 

Google's response was the AMP Project. AMP was “an initiative to improve the mobile web and enhance the distribution ecosystem”, with a format that would be “fast, flexible and beautiful, including compelling and effective ads”.  According to Google, AMP embraced the open web.

AMP supported rich content, images, videos, maps and social plugins. It was fast to load, and “allows the publisher to continue to host their content while allowing for efficient distribution through Google's high performance global cache”.

Who was AMP for?

Publishers and tech platforms using AMP HTML when it launched in 2015 (source).

There were more than 30 publishers that supported AMP at launch, including platforms like WordPress, social media like Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, and news publishers like the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BBC, Guardian, Financial Times, Economist, Hearst, Gannett and more.

AMP was clearly meant to be a competitor to Facebook Instant Articles, which had launched in May, and showed full articles within the Facebook mobile app, and the Apple News app, which had launched along with iOS 9 in September. Both required special formatting of articles, just like AMP. And publishers jumped on to all the new formats.

Publishers adopted the format, because while it didn't improve ranking in Search, it was required to appear in the Top Stories carousel.

But there were concerns that despite being open source, this was giving Google too much power to shape the mobile web.

The view from 2025

What you should focus on, rather than AMP. Source "Evaluating Page Experience for a Better Web" (Google Search Central Blog, May 28, 2020)

Google really pushed publishers to adopt AMP pages. Until they didn't.

The AMP Project was announced in October 2015, and AMP sites started being displayed in Google Search in early 2016. 

While AMP articles initially appeared in the Top Stories section of the mobile search results, they eventually appeared in the main mobile search results too.   

In 2019 Google expanded AMP by declaring it was just “AMP”, not Accelerated Mobile Pages, which meant “mobile friendly, but isn’t just for mobile”.

But that did not last long.

In 2021 Google Search started using page experience signals in site ranking, including Core Web Vitals for page loading, mobile-friendliness, HTTPS Security, and lack of intrusive interstitials (which would mostly be intrusive ads).

And it was no longer required for an article to use the AMP format to appear in the search Top Stories carousel in the Search results or the Google News app.

Not surprisingly, third party sites like Twitter discontinued support and publishers stopped using it. It didn't make sense to create articles in a special format when it wouldn't improve ranking or visibility.

Publishers have had to jump through many hoops to get their content seen. In 2015 it was these special formats for articles and being pushed to pivot to video. And today the problem is people who just read headlines on social media and AI overviews. 

Will there be a way for media companies to survive? I hope so, but there will undoubtedly be more changes.

References

Google Blog, 7 October 2015, "Introducing the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, for a faster, open mobile web"

Inside Search Blog, 7 October 2015, "Accelerated Mobile Pages in Search"

AMP Project (Internet Archive, November 2015)

Inside Search Blog, 10 December 2015, "AMP Project's fast mobile pages coming to Google Search"

Google Search Central Blog, 21 April 2021, "More time, tools, and details on the page experience update"