AMP is one year old and growing fast, will it ultimately trump responsive design?

On the heels of new Google research that shows the primacy of mobile in a cross-device world, the company is celebrating the first birthday of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and offering a roundup of milestones and success metrics.

There are now 600 million AMP pages on 700,000 domains. AMP publishers are seeing more repeat traffic and better engagement/CTRs. For example:

• Washington Post: 23 percent increase in mobile search users who return within 7 days
• Wired: 25 percent increase in click through rates from search results, with CTR on ads in AMP stories up 63 percent.
• The Miami Herald: mobile users who start with an AMP article spend 10 percent more time than those who land on regular mobile pages.
• In a DoubleClick study: 80 percent+ of AMP publishers realized higher viewability rates; 90 percent of AMP publishers drove greater engagement with higher CTRs; one publisher saw 600 percent greater CTR after AMP

Last month Google rolled out AMP in the main mobile search results. The company emphasized that AMP is not a ranking factor. However Google said it will show links to AMP-enabled pages vs. other versions of the same page.

Google spent a great deal of time over the past several years convincing developers and publishers to adopt responsive design to improve the mobile user experience. Responsive design and AMP are not mutually exclusive; however, AMP pages typically load faster than responsive pages. It’s possible that AMP will ultimately be preferred over responsive pages; however, the company has not taken an official position on this question.

More controversially, Google’s Adam Greenberg said at SMX East that AMP pages will override app deep links “for the foreseeable future.” It can be argued whether this delivers the best user experience.

AMP is at its core an initiative to improve the mobile web experience. While AMP is open-source and being adopted by a wide array of companies, Google sees the viability of the mobile web (vs. apps) as vital to its continued success.

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