With the iOS 15 release on September 20th, AMP URLs in Google Search just stopped working. Google is aware of the issue and said the issue should be resolved soon. This is only impacting Google searchers using Google Search on iOS devices that have been upgraded to iOS 15.
What happens. If you are on iOS 15 and you click on a website listing in the Google Search results, you will not be taken to an AMP URL, even if the AMP URL exists for that listing. Instead, you will likely be taken to the main site’s URL for that page, or a link to their mobile app – if you have the app pre-installed on your device.
Jeff Johnson, an iOS developer, dug into this and said with the iOS 15 Safari “User-Agent, there are no AMP links in Google search results, but if I simply change Version/15.0 to Version/14.0 and keep the rest the same, Google search results suddenly have AMP links again!” “This is reproducible on my iPhone, in the Xcode iPhone simulator, and also in desktop Safari Mac with its User-Agent spoofed as iPhone,” he added.
I added an example of what this looks like on my personal blog, if you want to see it in action.
Confirmed bug. Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed the bug on Twitter saying “It’s a bug specific to iOS 15 that we’re working on. We expect it will be resolved soon.”
Why we care. You might notice weirdness with your analytics data around your AMP URLs coming from Google Search over the past couple of weeks. Your traffic should not be impacted because the traffic is still going to your main URL, but traffic to your AMP URLs may have a decline due to this bug with iOS 15. It is still not yet resolved but it should be resolved soon.
About The Author
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.