Are AMP pages affecting mobile search visibility?

[KitSmith]

Hello fellow Mozzers.

I've recently seen a fairly hefty drop in search visibility on Google mobile, from 12.8% to 4.1%. Desktop visibility is unaffected. The same search visibility drop is echoed in SEMRush. However, Google Analytics shows that our site traffic from mobile hasn't changed.

The only thing I can think of is that we recently launched AMP pages. I know Google sometimes caches AMPs so they’re served off google domains. Could that mean that the cached version of the page is ranking rather than our own? That would explain the drop in visibility but stable traffic I think?! What other explanation could it be?

Many thanks in advance,

Kit

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Kit,

That could be the case, it depends a bit on how the tools are calculating the search visibility and what they're using as the source of the page. You might be right about the change, also interested in the answer here. So will follow this for future updates.

Martijn.

[dohertyjf]

Hey Kit -

This is a question I am seeing coming up a lot recently! I think you'd be well guided to either get in and do a deep analysis on your own site or hire someone to do one to get to the bottom of this. There have been a decent few people sharing some screenshots of Search Console (Barry rounded them up here) where some saw drops, others saw steady, and still others saw increases.

The results you see from AMP seem to heavily depend on the correct technical implementation (and Search Console shows you errors) as well as the type of SERP feature you are in (regular organic, carousel at the front or buried deep, etc).

Hope that's helpful.

John