AMP Pages Will Start Showing Original URL In Chrome’s Address Bar

A couple of major announcements have come out of Google’s 2019 AMP Conf in Tokyo today. It’s making some changes and introducing new features for its Accelerated Mobile Pages project. The company has revealed that AMP pages will now show the original URL in the Google Chrome address bar.

The URL has been a point of confusion, at least for those who experience AMP for the first time, since they weren’t actually taken to an optimized version of the webpage on the website’s own service. AMP actually delivered a cached version that was stored on Google’s own servers which is why such a significant performance gain could be achieved. A bar at the top would display the AMP URL.

Google is now changing that with support for Signed Exchanges. What that simply means is that when someone clicks on an AMP page link, they will see the original, correct URL for the webpage in the address bar. This will make copying/pasting the original URL a breeze even when viewing AMP pages. Cloudflare is supporting the standard with Google for those who use its servers.

This will only work if every element involved in loading the AMP page has support for Signed Exchanges. This means that the browser needs to have support as well in addition to the search engine and the website which published the link. This means that the original URL will only be displayed in a Chrome browser which loads a Google search links to a published article with support right now.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: AMP, Google