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: @beep , @kurtgessler , @schachin , and @rustybrick See also Mediagazer Tweets: Ethan Marcotte / @beep : “...pulling the plug on AMP looks like an easy win for both programmatic and consumer revenue. And most importantly, we regain full control of the user experience. And that's perhaps the biggest upside.” — @kurtgessler, https://kurtgessler.medium.com/ ... Kurt Gessler / @kurtgessler : The data is in. Just drop AMP. You'll be fine https://kurtgessler.medium.com/ ... Kristine Schachinger / @schachin : @Techmeme @kurtgessler As long as you're meeting Core Web Vitals, which is Google's new measure for speed, & migrated correctly there shouldn't be any negative effect. The only benefits of AMP were special placements in the SERPs, which they did away with some time ago, & page speed, now CWVs. Barry Schwartz / @rustybrick : Do all you SEOs agree? https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
AMP began in 2015 as a constrained fast-loading format — restricted JavaScript, banned iframes — and by 2016 Google was routing mobile search clicks to AMP versions of pages when available, making adoption feel mandatory for publishers chasing referrals. The ground has since shifted: an unredacted antitrust complaint alleged Google gave AMP a comparative boost by throttling load times on non-AMP ads, and Twitter moved to phase out AMP support entirely.
Against that backdrop, Tribune Publishing ran the experiment publishers were waiting for — dropping AMP outright — and its year-long referral data shows mobile search declines mostly tracked broader search trends rather than the removal itself.
First-order effects
- Tribune Publishing regains full control of its mobile user experience and ad inventory without a measurable search-referral penalty, validating the exit for its own properties.
Second-order effects
- Other publishers facing the same trade-off now have a public dataset to point to, weakening the practical case for maintaining parallel AMP versions alongside canonical pages.
Third-order effects
- If more publishers follow Tribune's lead, AMP's role as Google's de facto gatekeeper for mobile search visibility erodes, shifting leverage back toward publishers' own page-experience performance — a dynamic the antitrust allegations helped expose.
The trend: Publisher dependence on Google-controlled formats like AMP is unwinding as page-experience metrics replace format compliance as the ranking signal.