• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, April 21, 2016

Google is escalating its struggle with Facebook, Apple and other tech platforms for content from online publishers. This week brought the announcement that Google will begin highlighting content published with Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, on Google News for all platforms, including iOS, Android and mobile Web.

The goal is to improve the reader experience and provide yet another incentive for publishers to align with its platform.

As part of the new, high-profile treatment for AMP content, Google has created a new AMP carousel with important headlines and stories, according to Google News engineering director Maricia Scott. It has up to 14 headlines available at once, linking to fast-loading AMP articles.

Once in the AMP viewer, readers just have to swipe to retrieve other stories from the carousel.

Additionally, AMP-friendly articles will be distinguished with the AMP lightning bolt icon in the Google News feed. The decision to boost AMP content in Google News provides comes a few months after Google began highlighting AMP Web pages in mobile search results.

Scott pointed to data showing AMP delivers on its promises of speedy content on a lean data diet: “Our tests have shown that AMP documents load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than the equivalent non-amp’ed result. In many cases these stories will load instantly.”

As noted, the competition for content has become a clash of the titans between Google and its rivals.

Last week, Facebook unveiled new initiatives intended to make it even easier for publishers to distribute content on its platform, including a new partnership with social-publishing content management system RebelMouse, making the latter available to publishers on Facebook via an integration with Instant Articles.

Facebook also announced that it would allow publishers to publish branded content on behalf of advertisers on its platform.

Separately publishing platform Medium revealed that it is integrating support for Facebook’s Instant Articles and Google AMP.