Google will show AMP URLs before App deep link URLs in mobile results

Your readers download your mobile app? Well, Google won't be sending them to those deep links if you have AMP URLs active on your website.

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Google will now have AMP trump App URLs in the Google mobile search results. That means if a website has both AMP URLs enabled and also has a mobile app with Firebase App Indexing (formerly Google App Indexing), Google will show the user, even if they downloaded your app, the AMP URL over the deep link to the page within your app.

Google quietly posted this in their data anomalies page, where they wrote:

Search results on mobile devices have begun to direct users to the equivalent AMP page, in preference to the equivalent app or web page. This might result in a decrease of traffic to your app pages when an equivalent AMP page exists.

Google’s John Mueller confirmed this for me on Twitter saying, “Yes, at the moment if an AMP exists for a given URL then we will send the user to that AMP not the deep link.”

Again, if your website visitor downloaded your app and you deployed Firebase App Indexing, yesterday, Google would have sent the user to your app. Now, since AMP is rolling out to the core Google mobile search results, that user will be taken to the AMP URL instead.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is 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 can be followed on Twitter here.

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