Tribune Publishing says disabling Google's AMP led to very little impact on mobile search referrals, as year-long drops mostly aligned to broader search trends
Ahead of its June 2021 algorithm update, Google made a significant announcement as part of its shift to emphasize overall page experience …Tweets:@kevkdigital,@seldo,@schachin,@rustybrick,@beep, and@kurtgesslerSee also MediagazerTweets:Kevin Kapezi /@kevkdigital:Dropped AMP for a new client recently as the pages were getting next to zero visibility and the mobile web experience was pretty good anyway. https://twitter.com/...Laurie Voss /@seldo:Oh hey turns out the only reason AMP was worth doing
Context & Ripple Effects
Tribune Publishing's finding closes a loop that opened in 2015, when AMP introduced a stripped-down page format restricting JavaScript and some HTML tags, and hardened in 2016 when Google began routing mobile search results to AMP versions of pages. The format's value was always contested: a 2018 Chartbeat study found only about a third of 159 publishers adopting AMP in 2017 saw clear statistical evidence of a traffic lift.
What changed is the evidence base. An unredacted antitrust complaint alleged Google gave AMP a comparative boost by throttling non-AMP ad load times, and Tribune's own year-long referral data now shows drops after disabling AMP aligned with broader search trends — turning publisher skepticism into measured results.
First-order effects
- Publishers weighing an AMP exit now have a large news organization's referral data showing no measurable penalty, lowering the cost of testing removal on their own properties.
Second-order effects
- Google's leverage over publishers weakens if AMP compliance stops being treated as a search-ranking requirement, shifting the calculus toward formats that preserve full JavaScript and ad functionality — where the throttling allegations in the antitrust complaint become harder to justify.
Third-order effects
- If more publishers follow Tribune's path, AMP's role as de facto infrastructure for mobile news distribution erodes, pushing the industry toward page-experience signals rather than a Google-controlled markup standard — a structural question about how much say platforms get over publisher page architecture.
The trend: Publisher dependence on Google-mandated page formats like AMP is giving way to empirically tested page-experience optimization as the basis for mobile search visibility.