A piece of widely-unloved web technology, which I’ve described here before, may be on its way out. Google’s ‘AMP’ web page format was designed to help websites provide a faster-loading experience. We’ve all been on websites which are almost unusable through bad design, and this was an initiative designed to solve the problem.
So far, so good, but it came with the requirement that content could be cached and served up from Google, and that was always uncomfortable for supporters of a widely open web. In return, certain sites could find themselves getting more prominent placement in the Google results, so it was difficult for some publishers (particularly news ones) to refuse.
Now Google has said that any site can be considered for the search engine advantages previously open to AMP sites. Ensure that your site is as ‘lightweight’ as possible and scores well on ‘Core Web Vitals‘ and you can be sure that other sites aren’t being given any unfair advantage in Google’s results.
Few everyday business websites have probably gone into the world of AMP, but if yours had (there’s a WordPress plug-in, for example), you might like to compare the Core Web Vitals score with and without the technology.