It's not a conspiracy theory, I've worked with Google engineers over the phone and email for an agency...and this is one of their pitches. They now will even help you build the AMP pages, or just build them for you.

I was on a Hangout with two product managers of AMP, and they told me exactly the opposite. This was Oct 2017. The exception is the news carousel, which appears at the top of search results and also contains only AMP. As of right now, however, it's only news content, and I don't work for a news site.

My last call was a month ago, this was for a general home page of a site. If what they told me is not true, or what they told you is not true...Google needs to get their employees on the same page. But it appears from some of our experiences that it has helped rankings, which I find annoying and a bit baffling.

Yeah. We had a google employee tell us to build AMP to rank higher.

How does traffic staying flat after disabling AMP feed a conspiracy theory? That seems like a counterpoint.

And to the various other comments, Google's position that they are very open about is that users become accustomed to AMP sites being so fast that they start to favor them, so the click through rates should rise with AMP. If true, that seems entirely fair.

AMP is fascinating to me because it's something we can't discuss with any honesty at all. Instead it's over the top rhetoric where people with their outrageously abusive and unwelcoming sites complain that AMP is unnecessary because they could, like, make their site less abusive if they wanted. Any notion that AMP doesn't solve a real problem is just a non-starter derived from fantasy.