A little over a decade ago, when Google announced the Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative with considerable fanfare in 2015, the entire web industry welcomed it as a lifeline for the mobile internet. At that time 3G networks were not yet ubiquitous, smartphone processing power remained modest, and the mobile versions of news sites were suffocating under endless advertising scripts. In exchange for strict constraints, AMP promised pages that loaded almost instantly, and it also offered exclusive placement in the Top Stories carousel at the very top of Google search results.
The period from 2017 to 2019 marked AMP's zenith, with The Guardian, BBC, Washington Post and dozens of other large media organizations rushing to build parallel AMP versions of their content. The traffic numbers were genuinely impressive, especially in emerging markets where users could comfortably load AMP pages even on slow connections. Yet hidden beneath that growth was an uncomfortable truth — publishers were effectively tethering themselves to Google's private infrastructure and losing control over their own brand identity.
How AMP's decline began
The turning point came in 2021 when Google rolled out the Page Experience update and formally announced that AMP was no longer required to appear in the Top Stories carousel. That decision did not come out of nowhere, as a series of antitrust investigations and complaints from European publishers about AMP's monopolistic character pushed Google to rethink the program. The new criterion became uniform across all pages — keeping your Core Web Vitals scores, namely LCP, FID and CLS, within the recommended thresholds was now enough.
From a technical perspective, the shortcomings of AMP had been frustrating publishers for years, particularly the heavily restricted use of JavaScript that made it difficult to build modern interactive experiences. The AMP cache URL problem also turned into a serious headache because when a user saw an address like google.com/amp/s/, it became unclear which publisher the content actually belonged to, and brand recognition dropped noticeably. On top of that, maintaining two parallel codebases — the main site and its AMP counterpart updated in lockstep — became an unsustainable burden for small and mid-sized editorial teams.
Where things stand in 2026
As of today, activity in the AMP project's GitHub repository has fallen off a cliff, with the volume of core commits down more than tenfold compared to the 2022 peak. Vox Media announced a complete departure from AMP across all of its brands back in 2022, CNN and Washington Post gradually followed suit in the years afterwards, and their mobile sites are now built on fully responsive architectures. In our own practice, one regional news outlet that abandoned AMP in favor of modern lazy loading and WebP/AVIF image formats improved its LCP by roughly thirty percent and saw organic traffic climb eighteen percent within six months.
Modern web optimization rests on a fundamentally different philosophy — you should be engineering for the Core Web Vitals metrics directly rather than for a proprietary Google format. In practice this means inlining critical CSS straight into the HTML, lazy loading images that sit below the fold, adopting next-generation image formats, reducing geographic latency through CDN and edge caching, and warming up essential resources via preload and prefetch directives. This approach preserves full control over your brand and content while delivering results that comfortably exceed the speed AMP once promised.
Of course, no technology dies overnight, and AMP still has a niche presence in certain narrow contexts — some older news aggregators continue to prefer AMP feeds, and in emerging markets it can still serve as a lightweight alternative for very old mobile devices. But for any company or blog launching a new project in 2026, investing time and resources into AMP is a hard decision to justify, because the technology has clearly reached the end of its life cycle and Google itself has stopped actively promoting it. The smart choice today is a performance budgeting methodology combined with continuous Core Web Vitals monitoring, which keeps your site operating at the highest possible level on an ongoing basis.