As reported on Tuesday, some users were already seeing AMP results in Google mobile search results, but there was no official announcement.
A previous report from Ad Age indicated that the launch would come on Wednesday, and Wednesday indeed, Google made the official announcement:
In just over four months, AMP has come a long way, with hundreds of publishers, scores of technology companies and ad-tech businesses all taking part in this joint mission to improve the mobile web for everyone. And starting today, we’ll make it easy to find AMP webpages in relevant mobile search results, giving you a lightning-fast reading experience for top stories.
Now when you search for a story or topic on Google from a mobile device, webpages created using AMP will appear when relevant in the Top Stories section of the search results page. Any story you choose to read will load blazingly fast—and it’s easy to scroll through the article without it taking forever to load or jumping all around as you read. It’s also easy to quickly flip through the search results just by swiping from one full-page AMP story to the next.
According to the company, pages built with AMP load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than equivalent non-AMP pages.
As speed has been a ranking factor for some time, it stands to reason that using AMP will benefit you for SEO purposes.
Images via Google