How can you efficiently identify and fix AMP errors in Search Console?

What is the AMP Status Report in Search Console?

When a site implements AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), Search Console automatically generates a specific report that enumerates the detected issues. This report appears in the Experience section and categorizes errors based on their severity — blocking or non-blocking.

The tool scans the pages validated as AMP and identifies technical non-compliances: prohibited tags, unauthorized JavaScript, CSS exceeding size limits, missing attributes on images, canonicalization issues. Each error is accompanied by examples of affected URLs and a counter to measure the extent of the problem.

Why does this report focus correction efforts?

Google prioritizes errors in the report based on their impact on indexing and display. Blocking issues — those preventing a page from being considered AMP valid — appear first. This avoids wasting time on minor optimizations while critical errors compromise visibility.

The report also allows tracking the progress of corrections: once the changes have been deployed, a manual validation can be requested and the gradual disappearance of erroneous URLs can be observed. This feedback loop accelerates debugging and avoids unnecessary back-and-forth.

Is AMP still relevant for SEO in 2025?

Let's be honest: AMP has lost much of its competitive advantage. Since Google opened the Top Stories carousel to non-AMP pages that conform to Core Web Vitals, the technical requirement has disappeared. Many sites have abandoned AMP to focus on classic mobile optimization.

However, certain sectors — especially news and press sites — retain AMP for reasons of extreme loading speed and Google caching. In these specific cases, the Search Console report remains indispensable for maintaining compliance.

• Centralization: all AMP errors grouped in one place rather than scattered in logs.
• Automatic prioritization: clear distinction between blocking errors and warnings.
• Validation loop: ability to request a check after correction and track progress.
• Examples of URLs: each error displays relevant pages, making diagnostics easier.
• Proactive alerts: notifications when new issues arise following a deployment.

Is this report truly sufficient to diagnose all AMP issues?

No, and this is a point rarely mentioned by Google. The Search Console report detects AMP HTML validation errors — prohibited tags, missing attributes, overly heavy CSS — but it does not reveal performance issues. A page can technically be AMP-valid and still remain abnormally slow due to an undersized server or unoptimized external resources.

Moreover, the report does not cover business logic errors: reverse canonicalization, AMP links pointing to non-AMP, duplicate content between versions. These issues require additional analysis in server logs and index coverage reports. [To be verified]: Google claims the report helps "focus efforts on the most important tasks," yet provides no prioritization metrics based on traffic or conversions.

Are the corrections detected by Search Console immediate?

Not at all. After correcting an error, it's necessary to request a manual validation in the report — and even then, Google often takes several days to recrawl the affected URLs. During this time, pages may remain flagged as erroneous even when they are conforming.

On sites with thousands of AMP pages, this latency creates a frustrating gap between technical reality and what is displayed in Search Console. Teams must therefore cross-reference data with third-party AMP validators (like the Chrome AMP Validator extension) to ensure that corrections are properly deployed before waiting for Google's green light.

Should you still invest in AMP or migrate to optimized classic mobile?

It entirely depends on the sector and the technical stack. For an e-commerce site, AMP is often counterproductive: JavaScript limitations, inability to integrate certain tracking tools, maintenance complexity. Core Web Vitals are more than sufficient to ensure a good mobile experience.

On the other hand, for a media site that publishes 50 articles a day and seeks to maximize instant display speed via Google AMP cache, the investment remains defensible. In this case, the Search Console report becomes a daily production tool to prevent template errors from contaminating hundreds of pages. But beware: Google provides no public data proving a ranking gain related to AMP compared to a well-optimized mobile site.

How to access the AMP report and interpret errors?

In Search Console, go to Experience > AMP. The report displays three categories: blocking errors (in red), warnings (in orange), valid pages (in green). Click on a line with an error to view the list of affected URLs and an example of problematic code.

Google provides a direct link to the official AMP validator for each URL — use it consistently before requesting validation. Also, check that your canonical tags correctly point from the AMP version to the standard version, and vice versa from the standard version to AMP via rel="amphtml".

What AMP errors should be prioritized absolutely?

Firstly, focus on blocking errors that prevent Google from considering the page as AMP valid: unauthorized script tags, missing attributes on amp-img (width, height, layout), inline CSS exceeding 75KB, absence of the amp-boilerplate tag. These errors completely exclude the page from the AMP cache.

Next, fix canonicalization issues: AMP pages without a link to the standard version, or standard pages without an amphtml link. These inconsistencies create confusion for Googlebot and can lead to duplicate content. Warnings (deprecated tags, optional missing attributes) can wait for a later maintenance phase.

What to do if the report shows errors on deleted pages?

This is a common case: you delete an AMP page, but it remains listed in the report for weeks. Google continues to crawl it and report 404 errors. Solution: explicitly mark these URLs as corrected in the report, or wait for Google to naturally remove them from the index.

If the volume of ghost errors becomes unmanageable, check your AMP sitemap — remove obsolete URLs and resubmit it. A sitemap polluted with dead pages slows down the recrawl of active pages. These technical optimizations can quickly become time-consuming — especially on sites that continuously publish and generate thousands of AMP URLs each month. If you lack the internal resources to maintain this compliance, consulting a specialized SEO agency can save you valuable time and prevent costly visibility errors.

• Check each error in the official AMP validator before any massive corrections.
• Prioritize blocking errors (red) over warnings (orange).
• Ensure consistency of canonical and amphtml tags between the two versions.
• Request a manual validation in Search Console after each template correction.
• Clean up the AMP sitemap of all obsolete or 404 URLs.
• Monitor Search Console alerts to quickly detect new errors appearing after a deployment.