What’s going to change in the
SERP rankings?

SERP changes are coming, too.

For the past few years, Google has used AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages – as a carrot-and-stick to encourage sites to be faster. AMP sites get preferential treatment on search in general. On mobile, AMP results get a little lightning bolt symbol to show users they can expect a lightning-fast page. Most importantly, only AMP sites are eligible to appear in the news carousel at the top of the results page!

From a user experience point of view, AMP is great! But not every site has rushed to join the AMP walled garden, and Google is having to defend itself in federal court for using AMP anti-competitively.

Google’s Search team isn’t waiting for lawsuits to work their way through the courts. Instead, they’re going to quietly retire the AMP promotion. AMP will no longer be required to get into the search feature carousel on mobile. Any site will be eligible, so long as it’s super fast.

This is a very strong signal that Google is serious about Page Experience – they aren’t merely using it to try to compete with Facebook anymore. They want websites to be fast, regardless of the technology you choose.