AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an online publishing format developed by Google as a competitor to Facebook’s Instant Articles. It is similar to HTML and is optimized for mobile web browsing. Using special code, AMP-HTML is intended to help webpages load rapidly when clicked in the Google search results pages, though results have varied. Pages are cached in Google’s AMP cache, which, Google claims, allows them to be served even more quickly.
AMP was first announced on October 7, 2015, and, after a technical preview, the service was launched to web users in February 2016. The technology has received widespread criticism that it represents an attempt by Google to further exert dominance over the web.