Google has now begun showing AMP results in the Google Image Search on mobile devices, proving that AMP is an important project for Google in crafting a mobile future.
Images on AMP pages are displayed with the icon and the word “AMP”, and clicking the title will direct you through to the AMP version of the web page it appears on.
If you’re not familiar with the project, AMP, or the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, is a way to build web pages for static content that render fast for mobile devices. This includes AMP HTML, which has restrictions to ensure reliable performance, and extensions for building rich content. The Google AMP Cache is also used to serve cached AMP HTML pages.
If any image is displayed on an AMP page, Google will show the AMP URL, alongside the notable AMP icon, in the image search results on mobile. Below you can see an article from Techcrunch that displays the AMP icon with a link to the page on an Android.
However, at the moment when browsing the images within the search results, there’s no way of telling which images, if any, are on an AMP page until you click on the image. This is where Google will expand the image to show additional information, including the lightning bolt icon, and “AMP” before the title of the site. On clicking this link, you will be directed to the AMP page where the image is found.
The fact that Google is now beginning to show AMP results on the image results page shows that they are dedicated to growing AMP, and that it ss quickly becoming more important.
Google already shows AMP results in the core mobile search results, alongside the top stories for the latest news articles at the top of the search engine results page. The fact it is now also in image search results means that AMP will likely grow into other areas of Google.
