"Rank"? They claim no. But the mobile carousel is available only for AMP content, and that's actually _above_ the rankings. So it depends how you spin it.

“When an AMP page is available, it can be featured on mobile search as part of rich results and carousels. While AMP itself isn't a ranking factor, speed is a ranking factor for Google Search.”

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp

I would add that when pages are built properly they can often be faster than their AMP equivalents.

Not when clicked to from a link aggregator that has its own AMP cache like Google, Bing, or Baidu. In that case, the AMP page will often be prerendered and load instantly.

Isn't that almost guaranteed? As far as I can tell, AMP does three things:

1. It enforces some good practices / forbids certain expensive browser features.

2. It lazily loads images only when they are scrolled in.

3. It fucks up scroll-to-top and other scrolling behavior on iOS.

The first you can do with or without AMP.

The second doesn't cause anything above the fold to load any faster. If anything, you get an additional delay until content shows up when scrolling, because the browser was prevented from continuing to download the other images in the background.

The third regularly causes me to be done with a site in just a few seconds, which I guess is an optimization of some kind.

It's very achievable if you have full control over the site and you know what you're doing... However that's frequently not the case in many large companies.

Many times it just comes down to something along the lines of these pages being run by non-technical folks in sales/marketing that are just click-to-adding widgets/plugins/tags every week without ever removing anything. As a result, you see a lot of very low-hanging fruit make it into the final production site. It's not unheard of to see a website of a household name brand load in multiple versions of the entire jQuery library, for example. I've personally seen a major site from a recognizable brand that otherwise loaded in <1MB, but then proceeded to load Google Tag Manager and pull down an extra 15MB of JS/images.

My point is, I think you're discounting the "AMP enforces some good best practices / forbids some bad patterns" point.

I might be, that's not a world that's familiar to me. But I think if Google had only done that with AMP, no one would have any issue with it.

There's a few other things AMP does, it prevents a lot of repaints by allowing the browser to determine the layout of the page at initial load time. All content areas are predefined, so you won't have things change or your scroll position modified because some advertisement loaded 5 seconds in and suddenly you're scrolled up from where you were.

2 is also a bit of an oversimplification. It'll load images if they're likely to be scrolled to, which I expect is some heuristic based on distance below the fold, and it may cause above the fold content to load faster since it doesn't need to compete with below the fold content (on very fast connections this may not matter, on slower connections it probably does).

It's a Prisoner's dilemma then. I can hate AMP all I want, but I'm not going to remove it from my hypothetical web page. If I do, there will be others who don't.

> While AMP itself isn't a ranking factor, speed is a ranking factor for Google Search.

Isn't that hyper-misleading? Click-through is a ranking factor, and especially click-through without return and click-through to something else on same results page, and being on the mobile carousel increases click-through. Or do they exclude those clicks from ranking?

If speed was ever a major factor in ranking - the search results would be dominated by pages without trackers/ads/etc. Google would never do that.

Google announced back in May that Core Web Vitals would become ranking factors next year, and more recently they recently announced that this would happen in May 2021 (a year after the first warning)

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-core-web-vitals-p...

Largest Contentful Paint is something I don't get at all. How is this helping overall performance? A fast and light site typically does well on this metric, but a site that does well on this metric isn't necessarily fast and light.

I work at a digital marketing agency and can confirm that just enabling amp on a site will increase SEO value significantly.

My conversations with Google reps and experience at an agency differ from this. My experience has been and Google reps have confirmed to me that a performant enough site will not benefit from enabling amp.

It seems like they do assume amp pages are high-performance, but they're not the only way to achieve high performance.

Any sources or data you can share on that?

Aren't AMP results above the traditional search results on mobile?

Yes, AMP alone will not improve your organic search results but why should you care when those results come after AMP.

Yes they do. But monopolies suck and must be dismantled, anyway.

Yes, they give AMP content a dedicated area above regular search results on mobile.

Google can't say this directly; forcing people to use your upsell for preferential treatment is likely anti-competitive. Instead, Google ranks on page speed (among many many factors), and then offer a proprietary tool (AMP) that promises to help.

It still doesn't rank on page speed (it will start in May next year), and it's not that hard to make your website faster than it would be with AMP.

It's similarly easy to make your website slower than it would be with AMP. Absent a performance advocate in the development team, the features that reduce performance are much more apparent and valuable to most businesses.

> it's not that hard to make your website faster than it would be with AMP.

How do you beat prerendered? Your definition of not that hard seems to match my definition of impossible.