What Happened to AMP? Should You Still Use It in 2026, and How to Remove It Safely

AMP still works, but it no longer gives you any special advantage in Google Search. Google stopped requiring AMP for the Top Stories carousel in June 2021, removed the AMP badge at the same time, and in July 2026 stopped serving AMP pages from its own cache altogether. For most sites in 2026, AMP is a second version of every page that you maintain for no ranking benefit. If you still run it, plan to remove it carefully.

I first wrote about AMP in November 2016, when it was new and Google was pushing it hard. My advice then was to install the AMP plugins on WordPress and serve the fast version to search visitors. That advice made sense for about four years. It does not now, and this post replaces it.

What was AMP and why did everyone add it?

Accelerated Mobile Pages was an open-source framework Google launched with publishers in 2015. It let you build a stripped-down version of a page using restricted HTML, a limited set of AMP components and no custom JavaScript. Google then cached those pages on its own servers and served them almost instantly from the search results.

In early 2016 AMP pages started appearing in a "Top Stories" carousel on mobile, and later that year Google showed AMP results across ordinary mobile results with a small lightning bolt badge. The carousel was the real reason everyone adopted it. For news and blog content, Top Stories sat at the top of the mobile results, and for most practical purposes you had to be on AMP to get in. That is the "favouritism" I complained about in my 2022 post on Google and SERP features.

The trade-off was always uncomfortable. Visitors saw a Google URL instead of yours. Your branding, ads, forms and tracking all had to be rebuilt in AMP's restricted format. And you were maintaining two versions of every article.

When did Google stop favouring AMP?

The turning point was the page experience update. Google announced in 2020 that AMP would no longer be a requirement for Top Stories, and the change went live as the update rolled out from mid-June 2021, completing by the end of August 2021. From 17 June 2021, any news content that met Google News policies could appear in Top Stories regardless of format. The AMP badge disappeared from results at the same time, and AMP was no longer needed for the Google News app either.

The message was clear: what matters is a fast, stable page, measured by Core Web Vitals, not which framework produced it. The AMP project itself had already moved to the OpenJS Foundation in 2019, partly to answer criticism that it was a Google-controlled format.

The final step came on 1 July 2026. Google changed how AMP results are delivered: clicking an AMP result now takes the user straight to the AMP page on the publisher's own domain, not to a copy served from the Google AMP Cache in Google's viewer. Google removed the viewer, the cache and signed exchanges from its AMP documentation and said AMP content will continue to rank like any other web page. That removed the last technical thing AMP did that a normal page could not.

Does AMP help SEO in 2026?

No. AMP is not a ranking factor, it does not qualify you for any search feature on its own, and it no longer gets pre-loaded from Google's cache. An AMP page competes on the same terms as any other page: relevance, quality, and page experience.

The one thing AMP still does is force a lean page. If your normal templates are bloated, your AMP versions may well be faster. But that is a symptom of a slow main site, and the fix is to speed up the main site, not to keep a parallel one.

Should you still run AMP?

For almost every site I look at, the answer is no. These are the reasons I give clients:

• Double maintenance. Every template change, schema update, consent banner and ad unit has to be done twice. Things drift, and the AMP version is usually the one that gets forgotten.
• Weaker user experience. AMP pages often lose newsletter sign-ups, related content, comments and conversion elements because they are harder to build in AMP.
• Messier analytics. GA4 only added AMP support in 2023, and it still needs a separate amp-analytics setup. AMP sessions are one of the most common reasons I see inflated user counts and broken attribution in audits.
• No upside left. Since 2021 you do not need AMP for Top Stories, and since July 2026 you do not even get Google's cache.

There are narrow exceptions. If your whole site is built in AMP as the canonical version (sometimes called "AMP first"), it is just your website, and there is no second version to remove. If you rely on AMP for a non-Google distribution partner, check what they require before you switch it off. And if your main templates genuinely cannot hit good Core Web Vitals yet, fix that first, then retire AMP.

How to remove AMP without losing traffic

Removing AMP is low risk if you do it in order. The mistakes I see are almost always about redirects and tracking, not rankings. This follows Google's own guidance on removing AMP, with the steps I add on client sites.

1. Check your canonical pages first. Run your main article and product templates through PageSpeed Insights and look at the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console. If the non-AMP pages are slow on mobile, improve them before you switch. They are about to take all your mobile search traffic.
2. List every AMP URL. Export them from your sitemap, CMS or a crawl. Note the pattern (for example /amp/, ?amp=1 or an amp. subdomain), because the redirect rule depends on it.
3. Remove the rel="amphtml" link from the head of every canonical page. This is the tag that tells Google an AMP version exists.
4. 301 redirect each AMP URL to its canonical page. Use a pattern-based rule so /post-name/amp/ goes to /post-name/. Do not delete AMP pages or leave them returning empty files. Google warns that an empty document is treated as invalid and it may keep showing the last valid version.
5. Turn off the AMP plugin or mode last. On WordPress, disable the AMP plugin or switch the theme out of AMP mode after the redirects are in place and tested, so no URL ever returns an error.
6. Clean up analytics and tags. Remove the amp-analytics configuration, and check that your GA4 and consent setup on canonical pages captures the visits that used to land on AMP. Add an annotation for the switch date so nobody misreads the next month of data.
7. Monitor in Search Console. Watch the AMP report trend down and the canonical pages pick up impressions. Check the Pages report for unexpected 404s. Most sites see the swap complete within a few weeks as Google recrawls.
8. Keep the redirects. Old AMP URLs live on in backlinks, social shares and messaging apps. Leave the 301s in place permanently.

What to focus on instead of AMP

The goal AMP was chasing, a fast mobile page, is still the right goal. You just reach it on your main site now. Get Core Web Vitals into the "good" range on real-user data, cut third-party scripts that do nothing for you, serve properly sized images, and make sure the page is usable on a cheap phone on a slow connection. For news publishers, follow Google News content policies and use Article structured data properly. That is what gets you into Top Stories now.

If you are building search visibility from scratch, my basic SEO guide covers the foundations that matter more than any single format.

Quick answers

Is AMP dead?
The framework is still maintained as an open-source project, and AMP pages still get indexed and ranked. What is gone is any search advantage for using it.

Will removing AMP hurt my rankings?
Not if you redirect properly and your canonical pages are reasonably fast. Google ranks the canonical page anyway, so the AMP version was only ever an alternative way of serving it.

Do I need AMP for Google Top Stories?
No. AMP has not been required for Top Stories since June 2021.

Should I 301 or 404 old AMP URLs?
301 them to the matching canonical page. A 404 throws away the links and shares those URLs have collected.