--- title: "AMP's traffic record: five publishers, five different outcomes" url: https://seomadman.com/reports/amp-traffic-impact-cases-compared section: reports published: 2026-06-05T00:00:00.000Z modified: 2026-06-05T00:00:00.000Z author: Adam Hafez topics: ["Technical SEO"] --- # AMP's traffic record: five publishers, five different outcomes ## The short answer Five named AMP case studies disagree on traffic. Independent.ie gained roughly 55% mobile search traffic; Belfast Telegraph, under the same publisher, saw none. Chartbeat and the Daily Beast found only 1 in 3 of 159 publishers had a clear gain. Kinsta lost 59% of mobile leads. Search Engine Land and Future plc later dropped AMP with no traffic loss. ## Key takeaways - Independent.ie reported roughly 55% higher mobile search traffic from AMP, but its own Head of SEO credited a first-mover advantage, not AMP itself. - Chartbeat and the Daily Beast analyzed 159 publishers and found only 34% (1 in 3) showed a statistically clear traffic increase from AMP, averaging +22% with wide variance. - Kinsta, a lead-generation site rather than a publisher, saw mobile leads fall 59% after two months on AMP and reversed the rollout. - Belfast Telegraph, launching AMP in 2019 under the same publisher group as Independent.ie, measured no traffic change but a 49% drop in mobile digital ad revenue. - Search Engine Land and Future plc removed AMP in 2021 and 2022 and reported no traffic loss; Future's audience director said monetization improved. Ask whether AMP helped or hurt publisher traffic and the honest answer is: both, depending on which real site you look at. Five documented, named cases below span a lead-generation host, a national newspaper group's two different titles, a 159-publisher academic-style study, and two publishers who later ripped AMP out. None of them agree, and the disagreement is the finding. ## Five sites, five results **Independent.ie gained roughly 55% mobile search traffic when it adopted AMP.** Daniel Smullen, Head of SEO at Independent News & Media, reported the increase directly, then supplied the caveat that matters most: he attributed the gain to "the first-mover advantage of additional traffic from the AMP Top Stories carousel, and also because at that time, we had a terribly slow mobile site." Early adoption and a bad baseline, not AMP in the abstract, did most of the work. **Belfast Telegraph, a regional title in the same publisher group, launched AMP in 2019 and saw no measurable traffic change at all - but a 49% decline in mobile digital ad revenue.** Smullen reported both cases in the same article. Same company, same technology, different title, and the opposite result on both axes that mattered: traffic held flat while ad revenue collapsed, largely from AMP's ad-format and rendering restrictions. **Chartbeat and the Daily Beast ran the closest thing here to a controlled study, and found the mixed picture holds at scale.** Chartbeat compared traffic before and after AMP implementation across 159 publishers and found an average lift of +22%, but only 34% of those publishers, about 1 in 3, showed a statistically significant increase at 95% confidence. The Daily Beast's own A/B test inside the same research found no statistical evidence of higher Google-driven pageviews from its AMP pages, and lower revenue on the AMP format. **Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting company with no news content, lost 59% of its mobile leads after two months running AMP**, alongside a 16.67% drop in mobile newsletter signups and a 10.53% drop in mobile account creations. Kinsta disabled AMP and published the numbers as a warning to other conversion-focused sites: a template built to strip a slow news article down to load fast can just as easily strip out the trust signals and forms a B2B site needs to convert. **Search Engine Land and Future plc both later removed AMP and reported no traffic loss.** Search Engine Land saw a 34% drop specifically in AMP traffic between July and August 2021, after Twitter stopped referring mobile users to AMP pages and Google's Top Stories carousel began admitting non-AMP results; it turned AMP off that November. Future plc migrated 80 to 90% of its pages off AMP starting the prior autumn, and Stuart Forrest, its director of audience operations, said plainly: "there's been no impact on volume, and all the impact on revenue that we had hoped for." ## Why these numbers cannot be averaged together **The sites are not comparable populations.** A news publisher racing to win Google's AMP-only Top Stories carousel in 2016, a B2B hosting company measuring form fills in 2018, and a publisher group removing AMP once the carousel stopped requiring it in 2021 are three different businesses answering three different questions. Averaging Independent.ie's +55% against Kinsta's -59% produces a number that describes nothing real. **The baseline before AMP explains more variance than AMP itself.** Independent.ie's own account credits a "terribly slow mobile site" for most of its gain - AMP looks best precisely where the existing mobile experience was worst. Kinsta and Future plc, already investing in site speed for conversion or Core Web Vitals reasons, had less room for AMP's stripped-down template to help and more to lose from its ad and layout restrictions. **The competitive incentive changed underneath every case.** Through mid-2021, AMP was the only way into Google's Top Stories carousel on mobile, which is exactly the incentive Independent.ie and the Daily Beast were responding to. Once Google's Page Experience update removed that requirement in July 2021 and let any page meeting Core Web Vitals thresholds qualify, the traffic case for keeping AMP mostly disappeared - which is precisely when Search Engine Land and Future plc both left without losing traffic. ## Why we care **AMP's own relevance has faded since Core Web Vitals became the metric that actually gates Top Stories.** Google removed the AMP requirement from mobile Top Stories in July 2021 in favor of Core Web Vitals thresholds any page can meet, which is why the two most recent cases here are both removals with no traffic cost, not adoptions with a traffic gain. A technology-adoption case study from 2016 is not evidence about 2026's ranking mechanics. **A single AMP traffic number, quoted without its site type and era, is not a citable claim.** "AMP increased traffic by 55%" and "AMP cut traffic-driving leads by 59%" are both real, verified, named results. Neither one is "the effect of AMP" - each is the effect of AMP on one specific site, in one specific competitive and technical context, and reporting one without the other misrepresents both. **The pattern that actually replicates is about baseline speed, not AMP.** Every case where AMP helped involved a site that was slow before adopting it; every case where removing AMP cost nothing involved a site whose non-AMP pages already met modern performance thresholds. That is a Core Web Vitals story wearing an AMP costume, and it is the more useful takeaway for [technical SEO](/topics/technical-seo) in 2026 than any single case study's headline number. ## Frequently asked questions ### Did AMP increase traffic or not? Both happened, on real sites, and neither result generalizes. Independent.ie gained roughly 55% mobile search traffic; Chartbeat and the Daily Beast found only a third of 159 publishers had a statistically clear gain at all. The honest answer is that AMP's effect depended on how slow a site already was, its competitive category and the era it launched in. ### Is AMP still worth implementing in 2026? Google removed the AMP requirement from Top Stories in mid-2021, replacing it with Core Web Vitals thresholds any page can meet. Two of the five cases here, Search Engine Land and Future plc, removed AMP afterward with no measured traffic loss, which is the more current evidence than any adoption-era case study. ### Why did Kinsta's result look so different from the news publisher cases? Kinsta is a hosting company measuring leads and signups, not a newsroom measuring pageviews. AMP's stripped-down template that helps a slow news article load faster can just as easily strip out the trust signals and forms that a B2B site needs to convert a visitor. ## Sources 1. [How AMP Impacts Rank in Google Top Stories, Discover & Organic Search](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/amp-google-top-stories-case-study/403365/) - Search Engine Journal (primary) 2. [Research study: only 1 in 3 publishers see a clear traffic boost from AMP](https://chartbeat.com/resources/research/research-study-1-3-publishers-see-clear-traffic-boost-amp/) - Chartbeat 3. [Google AMP case study: leads dropped by 59% (how to disable it)](https://kinsta.com/blog/disable-google-amp/) - Kinsta 4. [Why we're turning off AMP pages at Search Engine Land](https://searchengineland.com/why-were-turning-off-amp-pages-at-search-engine-land-376228) - Search Engine Land 5. [Why Future waved bye bye to Google's AMP and hasn't looked back](https://digiday.com/media/the-juice-isnt-worth-the-squeeze-why-future-waved-bye-bye-to-googles-amp-and-hasnt-looked-back/) - Digiday 6. [AMP won't be required for Google's Top Stories section](https://searchengineland.com/amp-wont-be-required-for-googles-top-stories-section-335276) - Search Engine Land