The author’s views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
“Hey, how are you doing today on Google Discover?” or, taking these last few months into account, maybe I should ask, “Hey, how has the latest core update on Google Discover been treating you?”.
Because if, like me, you work or have ever worked in SEO in a media outlet, you surely have asked or have been asked this question. And it is likely that, even if you are not in a newsroom and you are an SEO consultant or work in content, this question has also got to you.
Google prepared a perfect storm for the last quarter of 2023, linking important core updates related to helpful content to more minor changes to the system that will make any ship rock.
Those of you whose daily routine is marked by the business of the Discover feed may now be asking colleagues about the Discover traffic they are receiving, which is something common that folks responsible for media audiences do to see if it is something generalized or not.
The goal? To give feedback internally on what is happening if that day’s traffic is not as expected or, on the contrary, to bring to the editors’ attention if something technical may be affecting it. This is the volatility of Discover, the game where not everything is random, and strategy and skill are increasingly important.
I am sure you have read many guides on how to optimize your content to rank on Google Discover, but this is not just another one. Firstly, because I think it is extremely relevant to contextualize the importance of this channel for publishers today. Secondly, because I wanted to gather the opinions of the best experts on this channel, who have also shared their concerns about it.
I invite you to stay until the end. Learn what you can apply to your articles to appear in Google Discover (and get a trickle of traffic). Review what’s new about Google Discover and how it has been affected by the latest core updates. Find a list of tools that will allow you to optimize your content and others that will enable you to measure your Discover traffic. And lastly, discover what some of the top experts on Google Discover have to say about it.
What is Google Discover?
When talking about Google, most people (and also SEOs) are actually talking about Google Search, the search engine. But in the technology industry, we also talk frequently about two other channels: Google Discover and Google News.
The latter, Google News, is a news aggregator available for desktop and Google’s mobile application, where different content published by the media (those that Google has previously validated as media) are shown.
On the other hand, Google Discover is a personalized feed of content available to users of mobile devices (watch this space because we have breaking news that it could reach desktops, too). But first, let’s understand what it is and then comment on what is new.
Google Discover was launched in 2018 and was deployed first in a few different countries. It soon became a phenomenon that began to catch all eyes due to the traffic-driving results it provided.
In its early days, some SEO professionals, bloggers, and other content creators detected an extreme increase in their direct traffic coming from mobile devices without any explanation. Google Discover was not (and still is not) measurable through Google Analytics, and until the first information surfaced on how to track Discover traffic was shared, the relevance of this channel was not fully understood.
Just to give you an idea of the difficulty of understanding Discover behavior, these are some of the different sources that Valentin Pletzer, Director of SEO and Audience Development at t-online.de, detected as Discover sources:
Source: Valentin Pletzer
What kind of content appears in Google Discover?
But the question (and answer) you are all waiting for is: what type of content appears in Google Discover? Google has always said that the content is personalized for each user, and the feed is created by gathering data on users’ activity, specifically those registered with Google, such as their past searches, viewed videos, interaction with news, locations, and followed topics.
The most important thing is to understand that we go from being the ones who actively search for information or perform an action (search) to being passive subjects: we simply scroll as users and are offered content according to our profile (discover), similar to a social network’s feed.
During October 2023, Google tested adding a Discover feed to desktop. Some users have already shared it on social networks, and Google has confirmed that it is experimenting with this inclusion. We will see if it ends up launching soon.
Source: MSPowerUser
Is Google Discover available and equally important for all countries?
On iOS devices, you can find Google Discover by accessing the Google app or Google Chrome. In contrast, on Android devices, you can access Google Discover by scrolling to the left on the Google app since Google’s search engine is integrated by default in this operating system.
Taking the above information into account, it is expected that Google Discover will have more use and, therefore, generate more traffic to websites in those countries where Android devices have a higher usage rate.
According to StatCounter data from August 2023, 71% of users in Europe have an Android device. For this reason, positioning in this channel is much more important in some countries than others, as it directly impacts the traffic captured by Discover. According to the same data source from the same period, some of the countries with the highest usage of Android devices are in Europe and Latin America.
Conversely, the US market opts more for Apple’s system, so iOS penetration is much more important. Apple devices have a 57% market share versus Android’s at 43%.
Why is Google Discover important for publishers, and how much traffic does it represent?
Google Discover is one of the most essential traffic channels for the media today and has even, perhaps, become the first source of traffic for some news outlets. Media audience managers have been reluctant to show data and share their Google Discover traffic percentages with the industry because it is one of the secrets every business wants to keep. But as I promised at the beginning, this article is not just another guide, so I bring you data to contextualize the relevance of Discover for publishers.
I have consulted the teams of two tools that offer real-time measurement of news consumption and allow filtering by Google Discover: Marfeel and Chartbeat. They are essential tools for any SEO team in a newsroom since Google Analytics 4 only gives you an approximation of where your traffic has gone during the last 30 minutes, which is not enough for a newsroom that has to make decisions in seconds when there is breaking news.
Marfeel is a measurement tool that was the first to track and understand traffic coming from Discover. After considering more than 3,000 different publishers worldwide, the team shared their findings: Discover currently represents 20 — 25% of all traffic, making it the second-largest traffic source globally. It is worth mentioning that Google Search accounts for 32 — 35% of media traffic, making it the top channel, according to their data. However, this is still an average figure, although never publicly confirmed, but is shared among professionals in the sector.
Chartbeat, another measurement tool, has been able to monitor Discover traffic as of March 2023. According to an internal study they shared with me, based on more than 4,500 different publishers worldwide, Discover also represents a very significant percentage. Chartbeat has shared the Discover percentage data by country to understand how relevant the channel is for publishers in each region.
As you can see in the following chart, there are two clear patterns that outline the prominence of Google Discover traffic: Spanish-speaking countries and European countries:
Source: Chartbeat (September 2023)
From my experience, having talked with some SEO colleagues from different media news outlets, I can share that, in some cases, this data is even more extreme, and Discover can sometimes have traffic peaks of 70 or 80%.
In fact, Jordan Sacksick, SEO of Liberation, shared with me that in France, “for some publishers (people websites), it can drive 80% of SEO traffic!”. From another part of the world, Daisy Wu, product manager at TNL Mediagene in Taiwan, told me that for her movies and series site and her cooking vertical, Discover visits do not reach 20%. But, for her lifestyle website, “page views from Discover can be up to 45%”.
Google Discover and publishers, a love-hate relationship?
From love to hate, they say, there is only one step. And the fact is that Google Discover gives us many joys to those responsible for SEO in media and content, but also many headaches and bad times. Because, as it happened with the last core update in October 2023, traffic may disappear overnight without any explanation.
That’s why I wanted to ask some of the most prominent Google Discover and news experts in the industry about what this platform means and how they would define it. Here are their thoughts:
How to optimize an article for Google Discover
After seeing and understanding how relevant this channel is for content creators, I am sure you are wondering: What should I do to rank on Discover? How can I optimize my content to rank in order to get that amount of traffic? Well, here are some of the key points to bear in mind if you want to optimize your content for this channel.
1. Keep an eye on trending topics
Trends and breaking news often appear on the Discover feed. That is why it is advisable to generate content around the entities and topics generating interest. Keep in mind that the lifetime of content on the feed is 24 — 48 hours and that articles do not appear immediately and can take up to a day to show up. To see the current trends in each country, you can check Google Trends.
2. Understand topical authority: Keywords vs. entities
Google has been talking about topical authority for a long time, and in Discover, it is completely relevant. Traditional SEO includes the use of keywords to position your web pages for a specific search, but the content strategy in Discover should be based on entities, i.e., concepts, characters, places, topics… everything that a Knowledge Panel can have. It is necessary to know in which topics Google considers we have more authority and relevance in order to talk about them.
3. Avoid clickbait in titles
“Use page titles that capture the essence of the content, but in a non-clickbait fashion.” This is the opening sentence that describes how headlines should be in Google’s documentation. I always say that it is not about using clickbait but a bit of creativity from the journalist. Generating a good H1 is also part of the job of content creation.
Google also adds:
“Avoid tactics to artificially inflate engagement by using misleading or exaggerated details in preview content (title, snippets, or images) to increase appeal, or by withholding crucial information required to understand what the content is about.”
“Avoid tactics that manipulate appeal by catering to morbid curiosity, titillation, or outrage.
Provide content that’s timely for current interests, tells a story well, or provides unique insights.”
Do you think this information fits with what you see every day on Google Discover? I would reckon there were many sites that did not comply with this and received a lot of traffic from Discover.
With the last core updates in 2023, Google was extremely hard on news sites and some niches with content focused on Discover, directly affecting E-E-A-T. The impact was so severe that many publishers shared drastic drops in Search Console with expert Lily Ray, who wrote an article with data from more than 150 publishers.
4. Images are important
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. If you look at your Discover feed, you’ll see most of the images catch your attention. They are detailed shots of delicious food, close-ups of a person’s face showing emotions, or even images where the character in question does not appear, such as “the new manicure that will be a trend in 2024,” persuading you to click.
Google’s documentation recommends adding “high-quality images in your content, especially large images that are more likely to generate visits from Discover” and notes important technical requirements such as images needing to be “at least 1200 px wide and enabled by the max-image-preview:large setting.” You may also have found that media outlets create their own collages in order to have images that stand out from competitors.
Source: Shelby Blackley (Canada)
Source: Clara Soteras (Spain) Translation: “The restaurant in Argentona to reconnect with simple cuisine (and with yourself).
Source: Ryan Mayer (US)
5. Know your audience’s location
One of the critical points that Discover’s algorithm takes into account is location. It will show you content related to the city or the place where you are and where you usually move around. That is why it is essential to know where our audience is located or which audience you want to target: is it the one that lives in New York, London, or Barcelona?
If you have traveled recently, you might have noticed that you’ll have suggested content based on another location, even days after returning from your trip. If you have gone to Seattle to attend MozCon, for instance, you might be suggested different articles with recommendations on what to see, local festivals, or what to eat in the city. A little trick here is to include the name of the city in the headline. Something like: “The top 7 places in Seattle you can’t miss.”
6. Abide by E-E-A-T
Tell Google who you are, what you write about, and how much you know. You may have heard of the famous E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), and in Discover, this factor is one of the most relevant ones.
When working with entities, you may find that certain authors on your site rank higher for some topics than others; this may be because they have a specific specialization, such as Miriam Ellis’ expertise on local SEO on the Moz Blog.
You can enhance author profiles by adding author Schema to their articles, which aids in being transparent to the user and to search engine bots. Additionally, you should include an author’s biography and link to the professional social networks where the author publishes and promotes their articles. But do not think that is all it takes to abide by E-E-A-T guidelines. You must continuously work on optimizing content clusters and entities to enhance the topical authority of each topic, section, and author.
Source: The New York Times
7. Internal linking
This is another factor that will help you position your articles. Promoting the recirculation of content and using pages with greater authority on your site can be an excellent lever to boost your Discover traffic. In media, the home page is the one that Google crawls the most, so placing a new URL on the front page could be a great option to direct Google’s bot to crawl your new piece of content.
8. Utilize the “buzz factor”
The “buzz factor” is another way to boost search engine bots’ view toward a new piece of content. The buzz factor involves getting a high volume of traffic in a short period of time — this is a clear sign that the content is of the users’ interest at that moment. Whenever we get lucky, and this occurs, we can work in a coordinated way with different marketing actions, such as promoting that article on all social networks, setting up push notifications, or sending it to our subscribers and newsletter users, and much more.
9. AMP vs. CWV
Google has stopped taking AMP into account (for Top Stories in Search and Google Discover), but what is now a ranking factor is the speed of loading the page, as well as the user experience, i.e., the well-known Core Web Vitals. We could go into more detail here, but it is not the aim of this article.
What I do want to mention is that Google prioritizes differently in Discover depending on the language. Media websites in certain countries have begun to disable AMP, while in other countries, such as Spain, website owners are still reluctant to do so. Spanish content works better in AMP, while in Catalan, for instance, the version that Google likes to show the most is the HTML version.
10. Utilize embeds
On Discover, we’re seeing more and more videos. According to some fellow experts cited above, those articles that have a video embedded, a tweet, or an embedded Instagram post rank much better and appear more in the feed. This is why we see so much news about a celebrity’s latest Instagram post or a politician’s tweet.
However, it is advisable to think about optimizing the loading of these embeds with lazy loading and ensure that they are not in the first viewport because they will generate page-loading problems that can affect SEO. You can experiment with this by including videos and tweets in your blog posts.
Latest news from the Discover feed
Initially, I had a list of 10 topics, but Google always has news, so here is a small summary of the recent changes in its documentation. Google has added a section in their Discover documentation titled “Why Discover traffic might change over time.”
It states that “traffic from Discover is less predictable or dependable when compared to keyword-driven search visits” and advises that you handle it as a supplement to your traffic. From time to time, you may have seen examples of traffic from Discover plummeting overnight. Here are some screenshots shared by web admins displaying just that:
Wild case of being hit by recent Google updates for this publisher (Oct 2022 Spam Update in particular). And this is JUST showing traffic via the ‘news’ tab. Web Search, Top stories, Discover & Google News are also bad. IMO, this reaction was a mistake on Google’s end. pic.twitter.com/wiuIdFaWBO
Hello Google Discover traffic… and goodbye. From one of my consulting clients. National business. The pages showing up here in Discover are product landing pages. Fascinating! @lilyraynyc #localu pic.twitter.com/MwzDHPTMh3
10th august Google Glitch : It seems that the problem is not solved on Google Discover for several publishers, at least in Europe (FR, ES, PL, etc.) Here is an example from a spanish website => Discover trafic down to zero. @JohnMu @dannysullivan : Is it under investigation ? 🙏 pic.twitter.com/icLAfQQfeL
Google has added three different reasons why Discover traffic may fluctuate:
- Changes in user interests: If a user no longer searches a topic, Discover will not display content related to that entity.
- Type of content: This is the first time Google points out what content is most likely to show in the feed (sports, health, entertainment, and lifestyle). However, Google plays it safe and ensures a continuous revision of the topics to meet the users’ needs.
- Google Search updates: This is probably the best way to justify the feed’s volatility. “Because Discover is an extension of Search, updates can sometimes produce traffic changes.” In short, Google is stating that if there is a drop in traffic to your site in Search, it may be due to an algorithm update. But the guidelines also highlight something else important: “It may be that there’s nothing you need to do after an update,” therefore stating that traffic fluctuation may have nothing to do with either the quality or frequency of the content you’re publishing.
Changes in user interests: If a user no longer searches a topic, Discover will not display content related to that entity.
Type of content: This is the first time Google points out what content is most likely to show in the feed (sports, health, entertainment, and lifestyle). However, Google plays it safe and ensures a continuous revision of the topics to meet the users’ needs.
Google Search updates: This is probably the best way to justify the feed’s volatility. “Because Discover is an extension of Search, updates can sometimes produce traffic changes.” In short, Google is stating that if there is a drop in traffic to your site in Search, it may be due to an algorithm update. But the guidelines also highlight something else important: “It may be that there’s nothing you need to do after an update,” therefore stating that traffic fluctuation may have nothing to do with either the quality or frequency of the content you’re publishing.
Source: Google Search Central
Measure and track Discover traffic
How do you analyze Google Discover traffic with Google Search Console?
Google gives us a few tools to understand which content performs better in Google Discover. Using Google Search Console (GSC), we can see the distinction in the Overview section between Search vs. Discover performance. You can go a little deeper through the Discover report in the left-hand navigation and see how many impressions and clicks your URLs are getting.
This option in GSC will only appear when you have a minimum number of impressions in the feed for some of your content, there is no other way to activate this report on the platform.
Photo: Clara Soteras
How do you measure Google Discover traffic in different analytics tools?
You currently cannot measure and view Google Discover in GA4 (you could not before in UA either). But, you may be wondering why “discover” appears in the source/media report in the new analytics. What GA4 does measure are the clicks that news stories get through the Google News Showcase in Discover.
Therefore, as seen in the screenshot below, the source and medium “newsshowcase / discover” in GA4 refers to the visits only those publishers who have enabled the service will see. Remember, not all media will have it available.
You may be wondering where the real Discover traffic goes. It is registered under the name “(direct) / (none),” which can also capture other types of direct web traffic. All these types of traffic are different from Google Search traffic, which is tracked within the “google / organic” source.
As I mentioned before, you can also measure Google Discover traffic with real-time tools like Marfeel and Chartbeat. But I’d also like to share some more tools that will allow you to work and understand which entities and topics perform better in Discover for your site.
- The Google Natural Language API can extract entities from your texts and classify them by categories. It also gives a numerical value according to the relevance of the content. With this, you can understand if you have drafted the text and prioritized the entities well in your content or if you should revise them to generate more authority around that topic.
The Google Natural Language API can extract entities from your texts and classify them by categories. It also gives a numerical value according to the relevance of the content. With this, you can understand if you have drafted the text and prioritized the entities well in your content or if you should revise them to generate more authority around that topic.
Source: Google
2. Google Discover Insights, an analysis tool created by Alexis Rylko, allows you to get many insights on your content, such as how many days your articles remain in the Discover feed, which day of the week they have performed better, which headline length has a better CTR, etc.
Source: Alexis Rylko
3. GDdash.com, an analysis tool created by John Shehata, allows you to fully extract the entities that are getting you more clicks, sorted by authors and by categories.
This tool can also detect if there is any inappropriate content that is affecting the rest of your content. It can also help you rate and score your articles to see if they need to be tweaked and changed to incorporate a new entity.
Source: GDdash
Who should you follow to stay up to date with Discover changes?
If, after reading this article, you still want to learn a little more about Google Discover, or simply want to stay up to date with all the changes that can and may happen, here is a list of some professional experts I highly recommend following. Many of them regularly share content about Google Discover and their findings via X/Twitter:
- Glenn Gabe
- Lily Ray
- Claudio Eduardo Cabrera
- John Shehata
- Barry Adams
- Valentin Pletzer
Glenn Gabe
Lily Ray
Claudio Eduardo Cabrera
John Shehata
Barry Adams
Valentin Pletzer
Some of the best examples from publishers around the world
This is one of the sections of the guide that I was most looking forward to. I have asked some of the experts you have seen previously in this article if they could show some of their best Discover screenshots. So here we go:
Source: Barry Adams (UK)
Source: Katerine Triana (Argentina) Translation: “How to attract luck with a chicken bone, according to popular beliefs?”
Source: Daisy Wu (Taiwan) Translation: “Why is ‘Ninja Turtles’, which has been adapted 7 times, not popular in Taiwan?
Source: Valentin Pletzer (Germany) Translation: “117 million euros won: Lotto winner (36) changes his strategy for the first time”
Source: Clara Soteras (Spain) Translation: “This will be the end of Elche (with dates and causes), according to ChatGPt’s visionary.”
I encourage you to share this article on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or any other social network and add your own examples. What have you been most surprised to find in the feed? Please tag me! I will be happy to discover new examples from different countries and languages.
If you have any questions about this article or about Google Discover, feel free to DM me on Twitter/X or connect with me on LinkedIn! I will be happy to answer you.
