AMP, short for Accelerated Mobile Pages, is an open-source framework that strips a page down to a restricted set of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so it loads close to instantly on mobile connections. Pages built this way can be cached and served directly from Google's servers instead of the site's own, cutting out a network round trip and making the page appear almost immediately after a tap.
In search results, AMP pages used to carry a lightning-bolt icon next to them, and for several years AMP was effectively required to appear in Google's Top Stories carousel. That requirement was dropped once Core Web Vitals became the general standard for page experience, so a fast non-AMP page can now qualify for the same visibility a fast AMP page gets. Many publishers who adopted AMP mainly for that carousel access have since scaled it back, keeping the framework only where its stripped-down speed still pays off rather than maintaining a separate mobile version of every page.
