Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., said Wednesday it will put websites built with its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology in front of more eyeballs by displaying the pages, when relevant, in the Top Stories section of a search results page. AMP sits alongside similar efforts by Facebook Inc., via Instant Articles, and Apple Inc., via Apple News, to speed up the rate at which articles load on mobile devices. Pages built with the technology load about four times faster and use 10 times less data than typical pages, Google said in a blog post announcing the general introduction of the technology.

The AMP technology improves the experience of reading pages on smartphones as well as more efficiently presenting the advertising that drives Google’s search business. It also indirectly parries one of the main threats facing digital ad companies — the growing use of ad-blocking software in response to slow, buggy and hard-to-use web pages — by stopping ads from slowing down access to articles. AMP works by having developers rewrite their pages in a slightly simpler and more limited language, and hosts the pages on Google’s infrastructure.

“No matter how many ads you put on the page the content comes first,” said David Besbris, a Google vice president of engineering for search. “If a user taps on something they will get the content immediately.”

Global Media

A limited test of AMP was started last October. The company has worked with publishers around the world, including the New York Times, the Guardian and BBC, to deploy the technology. The New York Times plans to post half its news articles in the AMP display format, according to Kate Harris, the paper’s director of mobile products. The Times posts far fewer — about 30 articles a day — on Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News.

“We’re going to launch a segment of our traffic as AMP — and a segment not — and continue to evaluate,” Harris said.

For publishers, one big unknown is whether Google will rank their articles higher in search results if they participate in the project. “If I were a betting woman I’d think they’d be ranking AMP files higher than non-AMP files just because of their performance,” Harris said.

AMP isn’t “a signal we use in ranking” pages, Besbris said. He declined to comment about whether AMP pages would rank higher, though he said some of the signals Google uses for search include whether a page is mobile friendly and how rapidly it loads — two problems that AMP seeks to tackle.

“We do think AMP documents will deliver users great experience,” he said.

Other Google updates

More than two-thirds of all Gmail users check email with their phones, Google says. Today Google introduced two new Android features to help consumers manage their inboxes on the go: rich text formatting and instant RSVPs.

Consumers can now can add bold, italic, underlined, colored and highlighted text to their emails—all from inside the mobile app. If consumers use Google Calendar or Microsoft Exchange, calendar invitations now include a one-tap option to show schedules and respond.

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