According to a new report courtesy of RankRanger, AMP results in Google’s News section has more than doubled in the last few days for mobile users in the United States. On January 25, 2017, RankRanger reported that AMP content was responsible for just 30 percent of mobile Google News results. Fast forward just a few days to January 29 and that number has now reached a whopping 70 percent.
When AMP pages first began appearing in Google’s News Box for mobile users in 2016, the fast loading pages were still a rather rare occurrence. In fact, AMP pages at the time of their debut didn’t even make up a quarter of results, according to RankRanger’s data. AMP has grown quickly, however, and as the number of publishers with pages optimised for AMP has increased, so too has the number of countries that display AMP within their News Boxes. In most cases, that means about 25 percent of news results being AMP with up to an additional 10 percent on a particularly good day. Today, though, that has changed and the number of AMP-optimised news pages within Google’s Top Stories has skyrocketed across the globe for mobile users. In France, for example, AMP pages within Goole News results were at virtually 0 percent. In just 3 to 4 days, that number spiked to well over 70 percent of all News Box results on the mobile search engine results page.
It’s unclear whether this is due to a change in the algorithm or simply a glitch, but if it’s intentional, it likely that AMP optimisation will be increasingly necessary in order for your content to be found by mobile users in Google News.
These findings come on the heels of John Mueller’s discussion on a similar topic in a Google Hangout posted to YouTube on January 24 and a tweet released the same day. In response to questions regarding AMP and ranking, the Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google stated that AMP is not, in fact, a ranking factor and that disabling AMP won’t result in a poor ranking. Of course, with news of the rise in AMP results in the Google News section, it’s not hard to believe that at some point, Accelerated Mobile Pages will be needed in order for website content to be displayed as prominently as it is now.
