Google will finally drop the prefix from Accelerated Mobile Pages

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages – or AMP – is a boon for the web in that it offers a relatively easy way for publishers to offer speedy access to their content for mobile web users. Since launch though each AMP page has included a ‘google.com/amp/’ prefix in the URL, but that’s about to change.

On the Accelerated Mobile Pages blog, Malte Ubl, Tech Lead for the AMP Project at Google has announced that the URLs will be dropping the pre-fix in the latter half of 2018. The change to the original publishers URL will please many content creators, and allow them to track data, as well as allow users to more easily share URLs with the knowledge it will get to its intended address.

The change is based on Google’s move towards implementing a new version of AMP Cache Serving which is based on the emerging Web Packaging standard from the W3C Technical Architecture Group. The Web Packaging standard will allow Google to offer up AMP pages with the publishers URL, while at the same time pre-loading content from Google caches, those same ones that allow for an almost instant rendering of the page.

Google has built a prototype using Chrome and ‘an experimental version of Google Search’ to trial the new standard and ensure that AMP behaves as expected before rolling it out more broadly.