For several years AMP was the price of admission to Google's mobile Top Stories carousel, so publishers built and maintained a second, stripped-down version of every article. That requirement ended in 2021. Yet plenty of news sites, blogs and ecommerce content hubs still run two templates, two analytics setups and two sets of ad integrations for a format that no longer earns them a special place in search.
Removing AMP is not risky because Google punishes it. It is risky because the switch touches thousands of URLs at once: redirects, canonical tags, cached copies on Google's servers, analytics tagging and ad revenue all move in a single release. Teams that treat it as "turn off the plugin" are the ones who see a dip.
This guide gives you a decision framework for whether to retire AMP, the performance checks to run before you do, the exact redirect and markup changes Google documents, and a monitoring plan for the eight weeks after launch.
What changed in 2021 and why AMP lost its search advantage
Google announced in 2020 that AMP would stop being a condition for Top Stories once the page experience update launched. Search Engine Land reported Google's wording at the time:
“AMP will no longer be necessary for stories to be featured in Top Stories on mobile; it will be open to any page.”
— Google, quoted by Search Engine Land, AMP won’t be required for Google’s Top Stories section
When the update rolled out in June 2021, non-AMP articles began appearing in the carousel and the AMP lightning-bolt badge disappeared from those results. Search Engine Land's coverage summed up the new position:
“But if you do not have AMP, then those non-AMP pages can now also rank well in Top Stories.”
— Search Engine Land, Google top stories carousel now showing non-AMP listings
Google's current AMP documentation is equally neutral. It says Google "applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page," and notes that AMP on desktop gets no search-specific features (Google Search Central, Understand how AMP works in Search results). In other words, AMP is now just one way to build a fast page. It is not a ranking factor, not a Top Stories ticket and not a substitute for good Core Web Vitals on your canonical URLs.
The trade-offs that Semrush's 2016 article “To AMP or not to AMP” raised still apply, only now without the search upside: duplicated templates, analytics that depend on special AMP components, and ad formats that need separate configuration.
Keep or retire: a decision matrix for publishers and content sites
AMP is not automatically wrong. A handful of sites have well-optimised AMP templates and canonical pages that are still slow. For them, removal should wait until the canonical template is fixed. Use this matrix to decide:
| Your situation | Recommendation | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Canonical pages pass Core Web Vitals on mobile in field data | Retire AMP | You keep speed while removing a second template to maintain |
| Canonical pages fail LCP or INP by a wide margin | Fix the canonical template first, then retire | Removing AMP would send mobile visitors to a slower experience |
| AMP pages break features (forms, comments, paywall, personalisation) | Retire AMP | AMP is costing conversions or subscriptions |
| AMP ad revenue per page view is materially higher than canonical | Investigate ad stack before retiring | The gap usually reflects canonical ad bloat, which also hurts speed |
| You syndicate through platforms that consume AMP | Check partner requirements, then decide | Some non-Google surfaces may still use AMP versions |
| AMP is generated by a plugin nobody maintains | Retire AMP | Unmaintained AMP templates drift from canonical content and schema |
For news publishers, the bigger levers for Top Stories are freshness, topical authority and clean article markup. Our guides to Google News SEO and Article schema cover those.
Proving the canonical template is fast enough before you switch
When AMP is removed, mobile searchers who used to land on a lightweight cached page will land on your normal template instead. If that template is heavy, you will feel it in engagement and possibly in conversions. So the most important pre-launch check is not about AMP at all; it is about the pages that replace it.
Use field data, not a single Lighthouse run. The Search Console Core Web Vitals report evaluates URL groups at the 75th percentile of real visits over the previous 28 days, with LCP good at 2.5 seconds or less, INP at 200 milliseconds or less and CLS at 0.1 or less (Search Console Help). One catch: if mobile visitors currently reach AMP, your canonical URLs may have little mobile field data. In that case:
- Check the canonical article template's mobile field data in PageSpeed Insights at origin level, which includes all page types.
- Run lab tests on 10 representative article URLs with throttled mobile settings, and compare against the AMP equivalents.
- Look for the usual culprits on article templates: oversized hero images (see our guide to responsive images with srcset), ad slots without reserved space causing CLS, and heavy third-party scripts hurting INP.
- If you run WordPress, work through the hosting, caching and plugin checks in our WordPress speed optimisation guide first.
- Set a launch threshold, for example "article template LCP under 2.5 seconds in lab tests on a mid-range phone profile, and no CLS above 0.1 from ad slots".
Remember that lab and field numbers disagree for legitimate reasons. Web.dev explains that lab tests use one device and network while field data reflects a distribution of real users (Why lab and field data can be different); our explainer on field data versus lab data shows how to read both.
The redirect and markup changes Google documents
Google's AMP removal documentation describes three routes: delete both versions, remove only AMP through server changes, or disable AMP in your CMS. For a site keeping its canonical pages, the second route is the relevant one, and the order of operations matters.
Step one: remove the rel="amphtml" link from canonical pages
Every canonical page currently announces its AMP twin with a tag such as <link rel="amphtml" href="https://example.com/news/story/amp/">. Remove it from the template. Without it, Google stops discovering the pairing through the canonical.
Step two: redirect each AMP URL to its canonical
Google's instruction is specific:
“Configure your server to return either an HTTP 301 Moved Permanently or 302 Found response for the removed AMP page.”
— Google Search Central, Remove AMP content from Google Search
Use a 301 for a permanent retirement; it is the clearer signal and the one that keeps old shared links working indefinitely (our guide to 301 vs 302 redirects explains the difference). Redirect one-to-one: each AMP URL to its own canonical article, never to the home page. Common patterns:
| AMP URL pattern | Example | Redirect rule (conceptual) |
|---|---|---|
Trailing /amp/ path | /news/story/amp/ | ^(.*)/amp/?$ to $1/ |
| Query parameter | /news/story/?amp=1 or ?amp | Strip the amp parameter, 301 to the clean URL |
| AMP subdomain | amp.example.com/news/story/ | Host-level 301 to www.example.com/news/story/ |
| Separate AMP folder | /amp/news/story/ | ^/amp/(.*)$ to /$1 |
Test the rules against a full export of AMP URLs before launch, and check for chains: if the canonical URL itself redirects (for example from HTTP or a non-trailing-slash version), the AMP URL should point straight at the final destination. Our guide to redirect chains covers how to catch these at scale.
Step three: do not blank the AMP files
A tempting shortcut is to leave AMP URLs live but empty. Google warns against it: empty documents are considered invalid, and Google then "continues to serve the oldest valid version that's available." That is how stale AMP copies end up showing outdated headlines or prices for weeks.
If you are removing AMP through a CMS plugin
Google notes that disabling AMP in a CMS affects the whole site and that some systems redirect users to the non-AMP page afterwards while others do not. Never assume. After deactivating the plugin on staging, request five AMP URLs of each pattern and confirm they return a 301 to the right canonical. If they return 404 or the canonical page with a 200, add redirect rules at server or CDN level before going live.
Clearing AMP caches and reading Search Console after removal
AMP pages are often served from caches such as the Google AMP Cache rather than your server, which is why they felt instant. Those copies do not disappear the moment you redirect.
Google's update-cache documentation explains that content can be permanently removed from the Google AMP Cache after it has been removed from the origin, using a signed update-cache request. That process requires you to publish an RSA public key at /.well-known/amphtml/apikey.pub and sign each flush request. The same page notes a limitation that matters for removals: flushing a URL that now redirects clears only that path, not the redirect target.
For most sites, manual flushing is unnecessary. Cached copies refresh within their max-age once the origin starts redirecting, and searchers increasingly reach canonical URLs directly. Reserve signed flush requests for pages with legal or accuracy problems where an outdated cached copy must go immediately.
In Search Console, expect these changes over the following weeks:
- AMP report: the count of valid AMP pages should trend down. Google's documentation suggests watching for this falling trend to confirm removal.
- Page indexing report: AMP URLs will appear as "Page with redirect". That is the expected status, not an error.
- Core Web Vitals report: mobile URL groups for articles will start to fill with canonical-page data. If they turn amber or red, the pre-launch checks above were not enough.
- Performance report: the "AMP article" and similar search appearance filters will shrink. Compare total clicks for article URLs instead.
Analytics, ads and other things that silently break
The SEO mechanics are the easy part. These are the issues that usually surface a week after launch:
- Double-counted or missing sessions. AMP analytics often ran on a separate configuration. Remove AMP-specific tags, make sure the canonical template's analytics fires once, and annotate the launch date in your reports.
- Ad revenue mix. AMP ad units, sticky formats and header bidding configurations do not carry over automatically. Ask your ad ops team to map every AMP placement to a canonical placement with reserved height, so you do not trade revenue for layout shift.
- Structured data drift. AMP templates sometimes had their own Article markup. Confirm the canonical template carries complete markup, including dates and author details.
- Paywalls and consent. Metering logic built with
amp-accessor AMP consent components needs its canonical equivalent tested end to end. - Internal links and sitemaps. Remove AMP URLs from XML sitemaps, RSS feeds and any internal links that pointed to
/amp/versions. - Canonical tags. Every canonical page should keep a self-referencing absolute canonical. Google describes redirects as a strong signal that the target should become canonical (consolidating duplicate URLs), so redirect and canonical should agree.
An eight-week monitoring plan with a worked example
Hypothetical example for illustration. A regional news site publishes about 30 articles a day and has 48,000 AMP URLs. Before removal, mobile organic traffic to articles averaged 210,000 clicks a month, of which roughly 70% went to AMP URLs and 30% to canonical URLs.
The team agreed these checkpoints in advance:
| Checkpoint | What to compare | Healthy signal | Rollback or escalation trigger |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | Redirect test on 500 sampled AMP URLs | 100% return 301 to correct canonical | Any 404 or redirect to home page |
| Week 1 | Total article clicks (AMP + canonical) vs previous four-week average | Within normal weekly variance (say ±10%) | Drop beyond 15% not explained by news cycle |
| Week 2 | Top Stories impressions for brand-new articles | New canonical articles appear in Top Stories | Fresh articles absent for several days |
| Week 4 | Mobile CWV report for article groups | Good or improving | LCP or INP groups moving to Poor |
| Week 8 | Ad revenue per 1,000 mobile sessions | Within agreed tolerance of pre-launch | Material sustained drop |
In the first week, AMP URL clicks fall towards zero while canonical clicks rise. The useful metric is the sum. If combined article clicks are 205,000 against a baseline of 210,000, that is a 2.4% difference, comfortably inside normal news-cycle variance. If the sum fell to 170,000 (a 19% drop), the team would check redirects, canonical speed and indexing before blaming the removal itself.
A practical tip: compare like-for-like news weeks. A big local story in the baseline period can make any later week look like a decline.
A launch-day runbook for retiring AMP
- Freeze AMP template changes two weeks before launch and export every AMP URL from your sitemap, logs and Search Console.
- Confirm canonical template performance and ad layout on staging.
- Write and test redirect rules against the full URL export; fix chains.
- Remove
rel="amphtml"links from all templates. - Remove AMP URLs from sitemaps and feeds; keep canonical sitemaps fresh.
- Deploy redirects and template changes together, ideally early in the week outside a major news event.
- Re-crawl a sample of AMP URLs immediately after deployment and spot-check in the URL Inspection tool.
- Annotate analytics, then follow the eight-week checkpoint plan.
Questions publishers ask before switching off AMP
Will removing AMP hurt my Google rankings?
Not by itself. Google applies the same standards to AMP and non-AMP pages and has not required AMP for Top Stories since 2021. Traffic problems after removal usually come from broken redirects or slow canonical pages.
Should AMP URLs redirect with a 301 or a 302?
Google's documentation accepts either. For a permanent retirement a 301 is the clearer signal, and each AMP URL should redirect to its own canonical article rather than to the home page.
Can I just return a 404 for my old AMP pages?
Google describes 404 as an optional extra step for removing AMP from non-Google platforms, followed by a 301 for permalinks. For most publishers a direct 301 to the canonical is simpler and keeps shared links working.
How long do AMP pages stay in Google's AMP Cache?
Cached copies are refreshed within their max-age once the origin changes. If a page must disappear immediately, Google's update-cache API allows a signed flush request, which requires publishing an RSA public key on your domain.
Do I need AMP for Google Discover or Top Stories now?
No. Non-AMP pages have been eligible for Top Stories since the June 2021 page experience rollout. Freshness, relevance, large high-quality images and accurate article markup matter far more.
Planning your AMP retirement this quarter
Retiring AMP is mostly an engineering checklist with one strategic question in front of it: is your canonical template genuinely fast for mobile readers? Answer that with field data, fix what needs fixing, then ship redirects, markup changes and sitemap updates in a single, well-tested release. Judge success on combined article traffic, not on the AMP line going to zero. If the canonical template is being rebuilt at the same time, our guides to Next.js SEO and preload and preconnect resource hints cover the rendering and loading choices that decide whether the new pages are as quick as AMP was.
If you would rather have the redirect mapping, performance work and monitoring handled for you, our page speed optimisation service and technical SEO team run AMP retirements as a single project. Request a quote with your AMP URL count and CMS.
Further reading on removing amp
- Field Data vs Lab Data: Why Your PageSpeed Scores Disagree
- Responsive Images With srcset and sizes: Serve the Right Image to Every Device
- Custom Extraction: Scrape Any On-Page Element With Your SEO Crawler
Sources for this AMP removal guide
- Google Search Central: Remove AMP content from Google Search
- Google Search Central: Understand how AMP works in Search results
- Google for Developers: Update AMP content (AMP Cache update-cache)
- Search Engine Land: AMP won’t be required for Google’s Top Stories section (2020)
- Search Engine Land: Google top stories carousel now showing non-AMP listings (June 2021)
- Search Console Help: Core Web Vitals report
- web.dev: Why lab and field data can be different
- Google Search Central: How to specify a canonical URL
- Semrush Blog: To AMP or not to AMP (December 2016)
