The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is a website publishing technology developed by Google as a competitor to Facebook's Instant Articles.
Announcement and launch
The AMP Project was announced by Google on October 7, 2015 following discussions with its partners in the European Digital News Initiativees (DNI), and other news publishers and technology companies around the world, about improving the performance of the mobile web. More than 30 news publishers and several technology companies (including Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and WordPress) were initially announced as collaborators in the AMP Project.
AMP pages first appeared to web users in February 2016, when Google began to show the AMP versions of webpages in mobile search results. Initially links to AMP pages were restricted to a “Top Stories” section of Google's mobile search results; by September 2016 Google started linking to AMP content in the main mobile search results area. AMP links in Google search are identified with an icon.
According to one of the co-founders of the AMP Project, Malte Ubl, AMP was originally called PCU, which stood for Portable Content Unit.
Growth and expansion
In February 2017, a year after the public launch of AMP, Adobe reported AMP pages accounted for 7% of all web traffic for top publishers in the United States
In May 2017, Google reported 900,000 web domains were publishing AMP pages with more than two billion AMP pages published globally.
In June 2017 Twitter started linking to AMP pages from its iOS and Android apps
Technology
Online Format
AMP pages are published on-line and can be displayed in most current browsers. When a standard webpage has an AMP counterpart, a link to the AMP page is usually placed in an HTML tag in the source code of the standard page. Because most AMP pages are easily discoverable by web crawlers, third parties such as search engines and other referring websites can choose to link to the AMP version of a webpage instead of the standard version.
AMP framework
The AMP framework consists of three components: AMP HTML, which is standard HTML markup with web components; AMP JavaScript, which manages resource loading; and AMP caches, which serve and validate AMP pages.
Most AMP pages are delivered by Google's AMP cache, but other companies can support AMP caches. Internet performance and security company Cloudflare launched an AMP cache in March 2017.
Third party integration
Any organization or individual can build products or features which will work on AMP pages, provided they comply with the AMP Project specifications. As of July 2017, the AMP Project's website listed around 120 advertising companies and around 30 analytics companies as AMP Project participants.
Performance
Google reports that AMP pages served in Google search typically load in less than one second and use ten times less data than the equivalent non-AMP pages. CNBC reported a 75% decrease in mobile page load time for AMP Pages over non-AMP pages, while Gizmodo reported that AMP pages loaded three times faster than non-AMP pages.
Parity with canonical pages
Google has announced that as of February 1, 2018, it will require the content of canonical pages and those displayed through AMP be substantially the same.This is aimed at improving the experience of users by avoiding common difficulties with the user interface, and increase security and trust