Google adds anchor button on AMP pages, to help readers see and share publishers' real URLs
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land :
Context & Ripple Effects
Since Google began sending mobile search clicks to AMP copies of articles rather than publishers' own pages (routing mobile results to AMP versions), readers landing on google.com/amp addresses have had no obvious way to see, copy, or share the real URL — a persistent publisher complaint as AMP spread through News and Search (AMP's expansion into News).
The anchor button is Google's first visible concession on the URL problem, arriving ahead of the structural fixes it later committed to: showing publisher URLs in the AMP cache and dropping the Google prefix from search results (the 2018 cache URL change), and eventually Signed Exchanges in Chrome to restore original URLs outright (Signed Exchanges support).
First-order effects
- Publishers get a visible, one-tap path to their canonical URL on every AMP page, restoring attribution and shareability that the google.com/amp address stripped away.
- Readers sharing stories no longer circulate Google-hosted AMP links by default, reducing the broken-link and branding problems publishers raised.
Second-order effects
- The button raises the bar for Google's own infrastructure commitments: the promised cache URL display and Signed Exchanges work become the measure of whether the fix is cosmetic or real.
- It signals to publishers that Google will trade some control over the AMP experience for adoption, softening resistance to AMP pages serving as the primary search landing page.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform-hosted content converges on URL transparency as table stakes — Google pairing the button with its content-parity requirement for AMP pages points toward hosted pages that must look and attribute like the originals they replace.
- The arc from anchor button to Signed Exchanges suggests browser-level standards, not per-product patches, becoming the durable mechanism for reconciling cached pages with publisher identity.
The trend: AMP's hosted-page model is being progressively retrofitted to restore publisher URL identity, with each patch — anchor button, cache display, Signed Exchanges — moving Google closer to making cached pages indistinguishable from the originals.