AMP Analysis.

Crawling AMP

Screaming Frog lets you analyse Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) quickly and efficiently, using the official AMP validator to bulk validate URLs.

The analysis highlights common SEO issues and validates pages by checking the required HTML markup, the HTML elements forbidden by the specification and more.

There are currently two ways to analyse and validate AMP:

1. Crawl a site to check AMP and review the data in the AMP tab.
2. Upload and check AMP URLs separately.

Crawling a site for an AMP SEO audit

First, enable the AMP option (Crawl + Store) in 1Configuration›2Spider›3Crawl and start crawling the website.

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1Spider › CrawlThe configuration section to open.2Resource LinksImages, CSS and JavaScript to crawl and store.3AMPTick Crawl and Store to crawl AMP versions.

Reviewing the AMP data

When the crawl ends, click the 1AMP tab, which lists every AMP URL found, and choose from the 17 available filters to identify common SEO or validation issues.

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1AMPThe tab with every AMP URL found.2AMP filtersThe filters to find SEO and validation issues.3AMP URLsAMP URLs with content type and status code.

Fifteen of the 17 filters are available straight away, while “Non-200 Response” and “Missing <html amp> Tag” are populated by running Crawl Analysis, which you configure in 1Crawl Analysis›2Configure by selecting AMP.

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1Non-200 ResponseRequires Crawl Analysis.2Missing html amp TagThis filter is also populated after Crawl Analysis.

AMP tab filters

Here are all the Screaming Frog filters for a granular analysis of a website’s AMP version.

• Non-200 Response.
• Missing Non-AMP Return Link.
• Missing Canonical to Non-AMP.
• Non-Indexable Canonical.
• Indexable.
• Non-Indexable.
• Missing HTML AMP Tag.
• Missing/Invalid Doctype HTML Tag.
• Missing Head Tag.
• Missing Body Tag.
• Missing Canonical.
• Missing/Invalid Meta Charset Tag.
• Missing/Invalid Meta Viewport Tag.
• Missing/Invalid AMP Script.
• Missing/Invalid AMP Boilerplate.
• Contains Disallowed HTML.
• Other Validation Errors.

For details on each filter, see the section dedicated to the AMP tab.

Crawl Analysis and URLs with errors

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1AMPCalculates Missing html amp Tag and Non-200 Response.2Auto Analyse At End Of CrawlStarts Crawl Analysis automatically when the crawl ends.

Crawl Analysis lets you easily find every AMP URL that doesn’t return a 2xx status code and needs fixing.

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1Non-200 ResponseThe active filter in the AMP tab.2Status Code 404AMP URLs returning Not Found.

To find the source of the AMP URL errors, click a URL in the top pane and then the Inlinks tab at the bottom.

Remember that ‘amphtml’ links are references to a URL via a rel="amphtml" link in the HTML head.

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1404 AMP URLThe URL selected in the top window.2amphtml linkThe link from the HTML page to its AMP version.3InlinksThe bottom window tab.

Here’s a close-up of the ‘Inlinks’ tab.

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1FromThe HTML page containing the amphtml link.2ToThe linked AMP version, which returns 404.3InlinksThe tab with inbound links.

In this example the HTML URL (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/essential-insights/cyber-resilience/) has a rel="amphtml" link tag to its AMP version (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/essential-insights/cyber-resilience/amp/), which returns a 404 status code.

Once you’ve found all the errors between the HTML and AMP versions, export the data from 1Bulk Export›2AMP and decide where to start optimising.

Uploading and checking AMP URLs separately

Alternatively, you can check AMP URLs separately in list mode, uploading a list from a file or entering it manually and crawling it.

The recommended approach is to check desktop and AMP equivalents together: upload the desktop versions and change SEO Spider’s configuration as follows.

First, switch to List mode from 1Mode›2List.

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1ModeThe crawl modes menu.2ListThe mode for crawling a list of URLs.

By default, Screaming Frog sets the crawl depth to ‘0’ in list mode, so only the uploaded URLs are crawled.

For our purpose this needs removing in 1Configuration›2Spider›3Limits, because the AMP versions (at crawl depth ‘1’) must be crawled too.

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1Spider › LimitsThe crawl limits section.2Limit Crawl DepthSwitched off, the Spider also follows the AMP links of the uploaded URLs.

With no crawl depth limit, the Spider crawls every uploaded URL and the links it finds, as in “Spider” mode.

So, to crawl only the AMP equivalents and no other internal links (otherwise we’d just repeat the full-site crawl described above), disable all resource and page links in 1Configuration›2Spider›3Crawl except AMP links.

With this set up, add the URLs to crawl, run the crawl and follow the process described above.

Video tutorial

Video tutorialScreaming Frog tutorial: analysing and managing AMPWatch the video3:44