AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) is Google's way to speed up the mobile web. By stripping all the unnecessary tags to load web pages faster, it's Google's answer to Facebook's Instant Articles and others similar.
In its 2017 I/O conference, Google said that its AMP is powering more than 2 billion web pages across 900,000 domains. The list of websites that support AMP has had a massive boost with some of the latest additions focusing on social networking. These pages are loading twice as fast as before via Google Search.
Lastly, the AMP network is also expanding to more e-commerce websites and covering more ad formats. The e-commerce expansions include websites like eBay, which first introduced AMP support on about 15 million of its pages in 2016, and expanding it to "millions more".
The improvement comes from changes in the backend, specifically with the AMP Cache that reduces bandwidth for images by 50 percent. Google also implemented a compression algorithm called Brotli that reduces document size by 10 percent.
Google is having some controversies regarding its AMP project. The company has been criticized for pointing people to Google, taking away traffic from the sources themselves.
Because many pages use Google AMP markups, those pages are optimized specifically for Google and indexed primarily by Google, and shown also primarily for Google users.
As Google has been able to establish the foundation and the basics of AMP to many people, it's also stepping up to commercialize AMP. For a company like Google that lives on ads, it's also ramping its efforts to improve mobile advertising experience.
But given by its sheer size, Google is killing the competition.
Since it's putting itself in the middle of how those ads are implemented, Google is in setting itself in a strategic place to show how future mobile web will be monetized.
