Is AMP truly beneficial for users or just locking the web down for Google's gain?

Why does Google emphasize emerging countries in this statement?

In emerging markets in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, traditional mobile web is often perceived as too slow and data-consuming. As a result, users prefer native apps or closed platforms like Facebook Lite, which provide a smoother experience on unstable 3G connections.

Google positions AMP as an alternative to these walled gardens. By making HTML pages instant and lightweight, the goal is to restore the competitive edge of the open web against proprietary apps. This is a strategic argument: defend the open web while remaining relevant in markets where the majority of traffic could slip out of reach of its search engine.

Is AMP really an open standard or a disguised Google framework?

Technically, AMP is open source. The code is public, managed by the AMP Project, and anyone can contribute. On paper, it's a community standard.

In practice? Google controls critical infrastructure: the AMP cache, pre-rendering in the SERPs, the carousel display on mobile. An AMP site hosted on Google's cache loads from google.com, not from your domain — raising questions about brand control and analytics. To say that AMP is not centered on Google ignores the fact that the entire ecosystem relies on the infrastructure of Mountain View.

What is the real impact of AMP on organic search rankings?

Google has repeatedly stated that AMP is not a direct ranking factor. However. For years, the mobile Top Stories carousel was exclusively reserved for AMP pages — creating a massive SEO advantage for news publishers by default.

Since this restriction was lifted in favor of Core Web Vitals, interest in AMP has declined. Many sites have abandoned the format. If AMP was solely about performance, why so many departures after the obligation ended? Because the technical ROI was questionable as soon as there was no longer a SEO carrot in exchange.

• Initially, AMP aimed to counter mobile walled gardens (Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News) by offering a fast and open web.
• Google's AMP cache hosts pages on google.com, raising issues of branding, traffic attribution, and analytics data control.
• The SEO advantage of AMP was indirect through access to the mobile Top Stories carousel — advantage now removed in favor of Core Web Vitals.
• Performance can be achieved without AMP through classical optimizations, which explains the decline in adoption since 2021.
• Google's discourse on openness is at odds with the fact that the AMP ecosystem remains largely dependent on Google's infrastructure and product choices.

Is this statement consistent with practices observed on the ground?

Let’s be honest: the argument of openness sounds hollow when looking at how AMP has been deployed. For years, Google used the SEO leverage of the Top Stories carousel to force adoption. News publishers had no choice: AMP or mobile invisibility.

The fact that Google eventually opened Top Stories to non-AMP pages in 2021 validates what many suspected: AMP was never essential for performance. It was a vehicle to enforce a controlled format. If the goal was truly "a fast web for everyone," why create an artificial dependency through ranking rather than encourage standard web best practices? [To be verified]: Google has never published data showing that AMP adoption in emerging countries actually slowed migration to proprietary apps.

What blind spots exist in this official position?

Martin Splitt talks about a "fast web for all," but he neglects the real technical costs. Maintaining two versions of a site — one classic, one AMP — doubles the bug surface, complicates analytics tracking, and fragments social signals (shares point to google.com/amp/..., not to your domain).

And that’s where the issue lies. For a small publisher or e-commerce, these technical and organizational frictions are not trivial. AMP requires dev resources, specific monitoring, and careful management of canonical tags. The ROI was only there if you had privileged access to carousels — otherwise, you paid the cost without a clear benefit. Today, with Core Web Vitals, a well-optimized classic site performs just as well without the constraint of a proprietary framework disguised as a standard.

In what cases does AMP still hold strategic interest?

There are still a few niches where AMP can make sense. High-traffic news sites that monetize through programmatic ads can still leverage Google's cache to reduce infrastructure costs. Some pure news players continue to use AMP for this reason — not for SEO, but for bandwidth economics.

But for the majority of sites? The equation has changed. Investing in classical Core Web Vitals optimizations (lazy loading, compression, CDN, critical CSS) offers a better ROI than a framework that imposes markup constraints and dilutes your branding. If you’re an SEO in 2025 and someone still suggests migrating to AMP "for search rankings," ask for numeric evidence — because data has shown the opposite for three years now.

What should you do if your site still uses AMP?

Audit the ROI of your AMP implementation. Compare SEO performance (organic traffic, SERP click-through rates, conversions) between your AMP pages and your classic pages. If the classic pages perform just as well, you are carrying a dead technical weight. Many sites have removed AMP without losing traffic — some have even gained user engagement.

If you decide to remove AMP, plan the migration carefully. Redirect AMP URLs to canonical classic ones in 301, update sitemaps, monitor Search Console for at least two weeks. Google tends to keep cached versions of the old AMP pages, which can create transient duplicates.

How to optimize performance without depending on AMP?

The Core Web Vitals are now the real playing field. Focus on Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Specifically: use a modern CDN, enable Brotli compression, lazy-load images below the fold, eliminate blocking JavaScript.

And that’s where most sites struggle. Optimizing Core Web Vitals requires sharp technical skills: waterfall analysis, code refactoring, careful management of the critical rendering path. If your dev team is already overloaded, outsourcing these optimizations to a specialized SEO agency can significantly accelerate results while freeing your internal resources for other strategic projects.

What mistakes should be avoided in managing AMP today?

Don’t maintain AMP out of inertia. Many sites keep AMP “just in case,” without measuring the true cost of this double maintenance. The result: undetected bugs, fragmented analytics, diluted ranking signals. If AMP is no longer useful, remove it — technical simplicity is an underestimated SEO asset.

Don’t believe that AMP is mandatory for mobile. Google has abandoned this hardline stance. A well-optimized mobile-first site with loading times under 2.5 seconds (LCP) performs just as well, if not better, than a poorly designed AMP version. Performance is a matter of architecture, not a magic framework.

• Audit traffic and conversions of AMP vs. classic pages to measure real impact
• Remove AMP if no SEO or business gains are demonstrable — don’t keep it out of inertia
• Prioritize optimizing Core Web Vitals: LCP, FID, CLS via CDN, lazy loading, compression
• Monitor Search Console after any removal of AMP to detect indexing errors
• Redirect dev resources towards classical optimizations rather than AMP maintenance
• Engage a specialized SEO agency if technical skills are lacking internally to manage these complex projects