Will AMP become a ranking signal?

By now you’re probably familiar with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) – Google’s open source initiative designed to deliver content on mobile at lightning speed.

The initiative has undergone a number of changes since it was first introduced in October 2015, leading many to question what its future holds.

Where once restricted to a carousel at the top of results page, AMP has now broken into organic results.

The question is: will AMP become a ranking signal?

To be clear, Google currently indicates that enabling AMP for your site will not boost rankings, but that policy could change.

So, will AMP become a ranking signal?

The answer to that question depends on who you ask.

From Google’s perspective, it makes sense to modify search results to accommodate an increasingly mobile user base.

Google has always championed the mobile user experience, which has occasionally put them at odds with developers.

Google’s recent mobile-friendly update is a good example of this complicated relationship.

With a polite nudge from Google, webmasters have begun to invest their resources to accommodate the push towards responsive design.

Depending on how you look at the situation, AMP may be a natural progression of responsive design or an admission of failure.

It’s entirely possible that responsive design failed to produce the speeds Google sought to provide mobile users, resulting in the creation of AMP. Perhaps there’s more work to be done, something that won’t sit well with some.

But as long as mobile search traffic continues to surpass desktop, there will be a need for change. If users want answers to mobile queries as quickly as possible, why wouldn’t AMP become a ranking signal?

Whatever the case, some will continue to argue that the existence of AMP devalues the modern capabilities of the web, and resistance will continue.

Will AMP ever become a ranking signal? It’s likely a question of when, rather than if.