AMP — Accelerated Mobile Pages — begin global rollout in Google mobile search results

In August, Google announced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) would be moving beyond “Top Stories” into the main organic mobile search results. Today, AMP officially rolls out broadly in mobile search.

Rudy Galfi, Google’s lead product manager for AMP, told me that the global rollout would be complete by the end of the year. He reiterated that this does not represent a rankings change. AMP pages won’t get a special boost in mobile results.

However, when there are two versions of a page, Google will prefer and link to the AMP version. AMP pages open within the AMP viewer and load much faster than conventional web pages — typically in less than a second.

Galfi wouldn’t share specific user-response data but told me, “We’re seeing great user response.” He also said that Google has been “humbled” by the industry’s response and adoption of AMP.

There are now more than 600 million AMP-enabled documents, which is apparently up from 150 million this summer. These documents are distributed in more than 230 “locales” and written in more than 100 languages. The list of companies embracing AMP is long, including Bing, WordPress, Reddit, Ebay and Shopify, among numerous other publishers.

Google added that AMP documents extend well beyond news content into shopping, cooking, travel, e-commerce and entertainment, among other categories.

AMP is an effort to make the web a more mobile-friendly and engaging experience. While mobile web traffic is significant, engagement is not. Most mobile user time is spent in apps.

The effort that Google is spearheading on the content side with AMP is conceptually similar to what’s now going on with the Coalition for Better Ads. While they address different issues and challenges, both are geared toward making the mobile web a more compelling place to be.