The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) lightning bolt icon has been shown on Google mobile results page for the past five years but has recently disappeared. Why?
Google released its AMP label to search engine result pages (SERPs) in 2016 to show mobile users that a website will load quickly and smoothly on their device.
In April, Google announced that the AMP badge would be disappearing around the same time the mid-June core update was released, stating:
“We will no longer show the AMP badge icon to indicate AMP content. You can expect this change to come to our products as the page experience update begins to roll out in mid-June. We’ll continue to test other ways to help identify content with a great page experience, and we’ll keep you updated when there is more to share.”
SEOs across the world have been talking about this new change on SERPs and have expressed concerns that clickthrough rates may drop, but we’ll have to see.
Looks like Google has removed the AMP flash icon pic.twitter.com/Rurv2LEwqR
— Valentin Pletzer (@VorticonCmdr) July 20, 2021
Using a select number of searchers, Google tested a new page experience label in December, so there are rumours that this label will at some point replace the AMP label on SERPs and be shown to all mobile users.
The AMP label disappearing on mobile SERPs comes at a time when Google is starting to phase out the requirement to have AMP implemented for any news articles to be featured in the top stories section on mobile SERPs.
This new mobile SERPs update shows that Google’s focus is now changing to user experience; again, this is shown with the recent core algorithm update that focuses on this.
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[…] their user experience and performance on mobile devices. AMP is still used on websites today, but as of April 2021 Google has stopped displaying whether a website is AMP in its mobile search […]