Twitter Cancels AMP

What Twitter actually changed

For years, Twitter did something most users never noticed: when you tapped a link on the mobile app or mobile web, Twitter checked whether the destination page declared an AMP version via the amphtml link element. If it did, Twitter quietly rewrote the link and sent you to the AMP page instead of the URL the publisher actually shared. Publishers opted in simply by having AMP pages at all.

In the fourth quarter of 2021, Twitter updated its developer documentation to say it would stop this behavior, and by the first quarter of 2022 the AMP redirection was fully retired. From that point on, a link shared on Twitter goes exactly where it says it goes: the canonical page.

That sounds like a small plumbing change. In practice it removed one of the last non-Google reasons to maintain a parallel AMP codebase.

AFTER (Q1 2022 onward) User taps link in Twitter app no rewrite, direct to shared URL Canonical page loads on your own domain Result: Twitter referral traffic now lands on canonical URLs, with your analytics, your ads, and your full template.

Why Twitter dropped it, and why the timing made sense

Twitter never explained its reasoning in depth, but the context does the explaining for it. Google's page experience update, which rolled out in June 2021, removed the AMP requirement for the Top Stories carousel and dropped the AMP badge from mobile results. Once any fast page could qualify for Top Stories, AMP lost its single biggest carrot. Publishers who had grudgingly maintained AMP purely for that carousel started asking what else was keeping it alive.

Twitter's redirection was one of the honest answers. It was the largest non-Google surface still preferentially serving AMP. When that went away, the ecosystem argument for AMP got noticeably thinner. Cloudflare and Bing had AMP-related projects too, but neither drove meaningful publisher traffic the way Twitter's in-app browser did.

There was also a user experience angle that publishers complained about for years: Twitter users landing on AMP cache URLs saw cdn.ampproject.org style addresses instead of the publisher's domain, share buttons captured the wrong URL, and paywalled or personalized experiences frequently broke. Killing the redirect fixed all of that in one move.

Timeline: how AMP lost its grip

What this did to your analytics

If you ran AMP through this period, you probably saw the shift in your data without anyone telling you why. Here is what I saw on publisher accounts I worked on:

AMP pageviews dropped, canonical mobile pageviews rose. The total was roughly flat, the composition changed. If someone on your team panicked about "AMP traffic collapsing" in early 2022, this was almost certainly the cause.

Twitter referrals became easier to attribute. AMP cache pageviews were a well known attribution mess: sessions split between the cache domain and your own, referrer data mangled, and separate AMP analytics configs that never quite matched the main property. Traffic landing directly on canonical pages fixed a chunk of that for free.

Engagement metrics on Twitter traffic often improved. Users landed on the full template with working navigation, correct share URLs, and whatever monetization you actually intended. AMP pages were frequently the stripped-down, worst-earning version of a page.

Should you still be running AMP at all?

My honest take: for most sites in 2026, no. AMP solved a real problem in 2016, when the median mobile page was a bloated disaster. But the problem AMP solved is now solved better by just building fast pages. Core Web Vitals gives you the measurement framework, and modern frameworks plus a decent CDN get you the speed without maintaining two versions of every template.

The decision is not automatic, though. Run the numbers first:

Check what percentage of your organic and social traffic still lands on AMP URLs. Look in Google Search Console (filter performance by AMP search appearance) and your analytics platform. If AMP is under 5 percent of traffic and falling, the maintenance cost of a second rendering path, a second analytics config, and a second ad setup is buying you nothing.

If you do migrate off, do it properly: remove the amphtml link elements from canonical pages, then 301 redirect every AMP URL to its canonical equivalent. Google has confirmed AMP pages drop out of the cache and index naturally after that. Do not just delete the AMP pages and serve 404s; they have inbound links and cached references you want to consolidate.

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