AMP and Google Page Experience: what is the future of accelerated pages?

We know it, by now, and we are bracing ourselves for it: in 2021 will come a new and comprehensive ranking factor with which Google will evaluate the quality of the pages and, in particular, the level of user experience provided, namely the Google Page Experience. On the occasion of the announcement, the attention was also struck by some collateral – so to speak  – news, which relate to the AMP project and that lead to question the role and the benefits that this framework can guarantee in the immediate future that awaits us.

Not only AMPs in Top Stories

The most controversial point of the Big G revolution is the feature of the Featured News that, until now, was completely prerogative of AMP pages. So, the site that wanted to intercept the clicks of users affected by the news in the Top Stories box had to necessarily implement accelerated page technology and compete with those who had made the same choice.

With the update of next year, however, the section will become open to all sites that guarantee a good level of page experience, making indeed useless the AMP – or in any case downsizing its distinctive feature.

An uncertain future for AMP?

According to many observers, in fact, the prerequisite to access the Top Stories is one of the major incentives for publishers to implement AMP pages; the removal of this benefit, as a result, raises doubts about the work to be done to allow the site to have accelerated pages optimized for mobile users.

Instead of focusing on creating (and managing) AMP versions of their pages, then, developers and SEO are wondering – quite legitimately – whether or not it suits you to channel all your efforts and resources to optimize mobile site experiences tout court, so to improve the perceived Page Experience and get ranking returns and visibility in the classic Search and in the various features of the SERP, Featured news included.

The history and characteristics of Google AMP

The AMP project (acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages) was originally created by Google in 2015 and later extended to other search engines and is an open source HTML framework that can be used to create fast-loading web pages for mobile devices.

Its goal is to offer site owners a way to quickly distribute their content to mobile users and, over time, its functions have also extended to posting ads and sending dynamic