Google Is Shutting Down AMP Cache: The End of the Geo-Block Bypass Era in iGaming?

Google launched AMP in 2015 as a technology to speed up mobile page loading. Affiliates used it to bypass blocking via the google.com domain. But in July, the company announced it was discontinuing caching.

In this article, we break down how the shutdown of the Accelerated Mobile Pages cache will affect webmasters and what to do next.

How AMP affected traffic

In 2015, mobile internet was slower than it is today: pages took longer to load, and most users closed the tab before seeing any content. Google offered a solution — AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). Simplified HTML without heavy scripts, content served from Google CDN, pages opening in a matter of seconds.

Initially, AMP was a mandatory requirement for appearing in Top Stories — the news block at the top of search results. Publishers added mobile pages to their sites because without them they simply dropped out of the SERP. 

WompMobile analyzed 9 million AMP pages across 26 domains — 77% of sites showed growth in mobile organic traffic, with an average increase of 27%. Japanese publisher Asahi Shimbun saw +240% in page views and +344% in ad revenue. 

AMP was certainly no magic pill for boosting traffic. Chartbeat conducted the first formal study of the AMP effect: only 1 in 3 publishers saw a long-term boost. AMP pages display fewer ads, and to compensate for the revenue loss, these page versions needed to deliver +23% more traffic — a threshold only the top 11% of pages actually reached. Major publishers — Future plc, Vox, BuzzFeed — began quietly turning AMP off.

In 2021, Google dropped the mandatory AMP requirement for Top Stories. Most publishers breathed a sigh of relief and forgot about the technology. But in one niche, AMP continued to deliver real value — iGaming.

Why the AMP cache was valuable for webmasters

Publishers forgot about AMP, but affiliates didn't. While major media outlets were quietly switching the technology off, webmasters in regulated GEOs were building entire funnels on top of it. And the logic was straightforward.

For example, a domain is blocked in Turkey or India. A user clicks a link — and sees an ISP block page. But google.com isn't blocked, and that's exactly how the AMP page was served: the URL looked like google.com/amp/s/yoursite.com, and the ISP saw a request going to Google. 

On Android this worked perfectly — and Android accounts for 60–80% of mobile traffic in most top GEOs. There was another bonus too: swapping pages in seconds. Change the URL inside the AMP wrapper and no redirects needed.

From July 1, Google is gradually shutting down the AMP cache. Users are now redirected directly to the publisher's pages. The AMP Cache is no longer being updated.

AMP as a technology isn't going anywhere — pages are still indexed and ranked on equal footing with other content. Google simply no longer serves them from its own servers. In practice, the era of working with the google.com/amp domain is over. 

Just how critical this is becomes clear from specific examples. The screenshot below shows that 80% of one site's traffic came through AMP — 113,000 clicks out of 143,000 over three months. The cache shutdown means a slow death for the project and a significant drop in conversion rate.

What to replace AMP with?

Unfortunately, there is no alternative to AMP in regulated GEOs. Webmasters who have spent years bypassing geo-blocks using Google's directory will have to accept the loss and rebuild their infrastructure.

Various sources mention PWA as an option, but these are fundamentally different tools. Web apps do load quickly on mobile internet, but they don't run on the google.com domain.

Interestingly, some browsers were already moving in this direction earlier. Brave, since 2022, learned to bypass AMP pages and show users the original domain directly; DuckDuckGo added AMP tracking protection in 2022 as well. 

Summary

For most publishers, the AMP cache shutdown changes nothing — they haven't been using this feature for a long time. For webmasters who built their funnels on google.com, it's a serious blow. There's no ready-made replacement, so adapting to the new reality is the only way forward.