Press release

Cloudflare Launches AMP Real URL to Give Publishers and Site Owners More Control Over Their Brands

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Sponsored by Businesswire

Cloudflare,
the leading Internet performance and security company, today announced
that it is launching AMP Real URL to give Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
publishers the ability to display content under their own unique
domains, rather than AMP-generated domains. With AMP Real URL,
Cloudflare customers using AMP can get all the performance benefits of
AMP without sending visitors to a domain they do not control.

The AMP
Project
, founded by Google, is an open-source initiative aimed at
optimizing mobile content and making it available anywhere, instantly.
AMP is great at providing content quickly to users and is especially
crucial for driving traffic to eCommerce sites and news publishers.
Google Search directs Internet users to AMP-enabled results (identified
by a lightning bolt). Historically, AMP required the Google URL to
appear in a browser’s address bar, meaning that publishers could not
display their own domains and direct visitors to their own sites. AMP
Real URL keeps traffic on publishers’ sites, giving them control over
their pages, analytics, and the way their content is displayed to users.

To build this at scale, Cloudflare worked with Google to implement an
emerging standard called Signed
Exchanges
. This technology, paired with Cloudflare’s global network
of 175 data centers in 75+ countries, allows Cloudflare to digitally
sign each AMP page it delivers to Google’s AMP Cache. Supported browsers
will now show actual domains (example.com) instead of the Google AMP URL
(google.com/amp/example.com) so that publishers can control their own
cookies, analytics, and brand in their URL bar. Cloudflare is currently
the only company with a CDN solution to implement AMP Signed Exchanges.
Cloudflare customers can enable this feature with one-click on their
dashboards, and it will roll out over the next few weeks.

“The AMP Project has allowed site owners and publishers to deliver fast
content globally and monetize their sites. We’ve enjoyed working with
Cloudflare to develop solutions to make AMP the best it can be,” said
Malte Ubl, Technical Lead for the AMP Project at Google. “Cloudflare
Workers made this seamless to develop and deploy, and will help scale
better AMP URLs to the web community.”

Publishers and website owners using Cloudflare and AMP will experience:

  • Brand Protection: Instead of featuring content on a Google
    domain, publishers will now be able to direct AMP traffic to their
    primary website domain.
  • Easier Analytics: AMP Real URL greatly simplifies web analytics
    for its users by ensuring all visitors, AMP or otherwise, can coexist
    on the same domain.
  • Increased Screen Space: Publishers can enjoy more space to
    display their content on mobile screens. Previously, publishers using
    AMP had to make room for a “grey bar” at the top of their pages—space
    they could otherwise use for their own branding and monetization
    purposes.
  • Reduced Bounce Rate: Website visitors may be more likely to
    stay on sites with publisher-branded domains.
  • Content Signing: By relying on cryptographic techniques, AMP
    Real URL ensures that the content delivered to visitors has not been
    manipulated, protecting the sites and brands it is used on.

“AMP has been a great solution to improve the performance of the
Internet and we were eager to work with the AMP Project to help
eliminate one of AMP’s biggest issues—that it wasn’t served from a
publisher’s perspective,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of
Cloudflare. “As the only provider currently enabling this new solution,
our global scale will allow publishers everywhere to benefit from a
faster and more brand-aware mobile experience for their content.”

Media, eCommerce, and recruiting organizations are eager to use AMP Real
URL to further take advantage of the benefits of AMP:

“AMP has played a key role in helping us to more effectively reach our
audience and develop our online community,” said Andrew Warner, CTO of
Genius. “We’re keen to use AMP Real URL to better manage our online
presence and keep our users engaged on the site.”

“AMP is a crucial part of helping our business to grow and reach
consumers everywhere,” said Sumantro Das, Senior Director, Product
Innovations & Growth Brands GM, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM. “With AMP Real URL,
we now have more control over our brand and can run analytics on our
business site.”

“The performance benefits of AMP deliver value to our business and we
are excited to see how AMP Real URL is able to take that even further,”
said Solomon Moskalenko, Director of Interactive, US Xpress Trucking,
The Johnson Group.

AMP Real URL is built on top of the same Cloudflare
Workers
infrastructure which thousands of developers use to deploy
code on top of Cloudflare’s global network. Today, Cloudflare customers
can enable AMP Real URL, for free. To learn more about AMP Real URL,
check out the resources below.

About Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc. (www.cloudflare.com
/ @cloudflare) is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today
the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers more
than 10 trillion requests per month, accounting for 10 percent of all
Internet requests. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet
application online without adding hardware, installing software, or
changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have
all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which
gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant
improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.
Cloudflare was recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Technology
Pioneer, named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list, and
ranked among the World’s 10 Most Innovative Enterprise Companies by Fast
Company. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Cloudflare has offices in
Austin, TX, Champaign, IL, New York, NY, San Jose, CA, Washington, D.C.,
London, Munich, Beijing, Singapore, and Sydney.