Ad Age: Google Is To Launch AMP In Search Results On February 24, 2016

Advertising Age reports that Google’s AMP initiative will be taking off this coming Wednesday, February 24.

That means that mobile searchers will begin to see AMP-optimized content from publishers in the search results as soon as this Wednesday.

We knew this would launch in February 2016, but now we have the official date. As we described before, AMP is designed to make web pages faster to load for users by slimming down a lot elements users need to download when visiting a web page. AMP has been adopted as a protocol by Google, Twitter and many other organizations and publishers. Google is launching AMP for their mobile results next month.

Recently, Google released AMP error reports to help webmasters get ready to be AMP-friendly.

Richard Gingras, senior director, news and social products at Google, told Advertising Age today, “Clearly, AMP takes speed to a point of extreme, so, obviously we look to leverage that. Again, it is only one signal. AMP doesn’t mean adopt AMP and get a massive boost in search ranking. That is not the case. All of the other signals need to be satisfied as well. But without question speed matters. If we had two articles that from a signaling perspective scored the same in all other characteristics but for speed, then yes we will give an emphasis to the one with speed because that is what users find compelling.”

To see a demo of AMP in action at Google go to g.co/ampdemo on your mobile device and search for [SEO].

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.