Google really did everything it could to push its disliked Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project that promises faster pages on mobile but ended up just making life more complicated for web developers and users alike. Now, five years after first showing the AMP lightning bolt next to search results to denote how fast they’re supposed to be, Google has stopped drawing this distinction between AMP and regular pages in Search.

The change is slowly rolling out as part of Google’s latest changes to page ranking in its search engine. Google announced back in April that it will no longer force web developers to create AMP pages to rank better in search, with regular websites slated to show up in the news carousel which was previously reserved for AMP sites only. Google is actually deemphasizing AMP across the board — you won’t find the lightning icon anywhere in the future, neither in Search nor in Google News, where it used to play a big role, too. Here, Google says that “we’re expanding the usage of non-AMP content to power the core experience on news.google.com and in the Google News app.”

 

Left: An old screenshot showing the AMP logo. Right: No more AMP in search results.

Overall, this change is much overdue. Nobody ever truly loved AMP websites. While AMP may have helped some smaller publications create better mobile experiences, AMP sites come with many limitations that make them much worse than their HTML counterparts. For example, it isn’t possible to easily copy and share the true URLs right from AMP sites, and you can’t embed interactive polls and forms, which is regularly a problem for our weekend poll.

We can only hope that Google will further deemphasize AMP on mobile and will instead use its resources to promote the usage of better performing HTML and JavaScript technologies.