AMP Doesn’t Always Improve Site Performance, But Many Publishers Have No Good Choice ⇥ unlikekinds.com

Walid Halabi, Unlike Kinds (via Michael Tsai):

But Google already ranks websites by speed. This tells us that every crawled site’s performance is measured in some way that Google finds accurate enough to use for a site’s ranking – you know, the position on Google’s results that can literally mean the difference between a failed business and one that makes millions of dollars, that an $80 billion industry is built upon.

So you’d imagine that Google’s existing page speed ranking could easily be used to limit which sites appear in the carousel. Anything with a performance score below an 80 could appear as a performance issue in Google Search Console, and the site demoted.

But no, Google insists you build your website with their technology.

Google isn’t slowing down in its push to recraft and control the language used to build the web. A couple of weeks ago, they officially launched AMP for email, which is terrible in every way. Yet, there is simply no good choice for publishers who want a chance of their stories appearing at the top of the page for anyone using Google on their phone. This power grab is disgusting and should be treated as an attempt at a hostile takeover.