• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 28, 2020

On Tuesday, Google announced it is testing a tool that will recognize if an AMP document is a Web Story, a visual storytelling format in Google Search results that also can serve up in Google Images, Discover, and the Google app.

“In our testing tools and Performance report, we’ll use the term Web Story to identify this format,” Google tweeted.

Google gives developers a place to test the Web Story and provides marketers with a way to identify them in Google Search Console

Born out of Google’s AMP project, Web Story is formerly known as AMP Stories. It provides content publishers with a mobile-focused format to deliver news and information.

Earlier this month, Google announced the launch in beta of its Web Stories WordPress plugin that WordPress Tavern describes as a “custom editor for creating AMP-powered stories within WordPress.”

The story format typically makes more use of visual information than it does text, writes Justin Tadlock, blogger at WordPress Tavern.

“Each page of a story tends to use images or videos, often in the background with text overlaid, to grab the viewer’s attention,” he wrote. “However, there are no hard rules on what content a story page can present.”