Demoed at Google I/O: AMP cache URLs showing publisher’s URL instead of Google AMP URL

In January, Google announced a solution for the AMP cache URL problem where Google would show and allow you to share the Google AMP URL instead of the publisher’s URL. Google at I/O demonstrated an early beta of how this would look like for a publisher.

For example, instead of showing the URL http://google.com/amp, Google will show the publisher’s real URL — in this example, foodnetwork.com. Here is a GIF of this in action:

You can see a searcher coming from Google search mobile, clicking on an AMP page and not being served the google.com/amp URL but instead being served a URL on the publisher’s site, foodnetwork.com.

Google explained technically how this is working. Again, this is an early beta:

The Chrome team has built enough Signed Exchange support for developers to try it out. Starting with Chrome 67 on Android — in Beta channel at the time of writing — you can enable the experimental “Signed HTTP Exchange” flag under chrome://flags to use Web Packaging’s signed exchanges. In parallel with this experimental implementation, the Chrome team has also been collecting feedback from members of standards bodies, other browser vendors, security experts, and publishers and web developers to refine and improve the Web Packaging specifications.

Last, to tie everything together, the Google Search team has implemented a version of Google Search that illustrates the end-to-end flow. When a signed exchange is available, instead of linking to an AMP page served from Google’s AMP Cache, Google Search links to a signed AMP page served from Google’s cache.

Follow all of our Google I/O 2018 coverage here.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.