Overview
Google Discover is the personalized feed of articles and videos shown in the Google app and under the search box on mobile, chosen from a user’s interests rather than a typed query. Pages need no special markup to appear; anything indexed and compliant with Discover policies is eligible (Get on Discover). Practitioners describe it as an under-used traffic source for sites that publish timely, visual stories, and traffic tends to arrive in spikes rather than as a steady baseline.
Decide whether Discover fits the site first
Commit to Discover only when the site publishes on a regular cadence. The feed favors fresh stories and interests a user follows, so news, data journalism, reviews, and recurring visual features fit. Practitioners report good results with data stories, maps, and a weekly “story of the week” visual, and say the channel pays off only with a recurring publishing habit.
An evergreen reference site, such as a vault of best-practice pages, usually earns little Discover traffic. Its pages answer questions people type, which is search traffic, and rarely carry a news hook. For such sites, the image and title work below is still worth doing because it also improves search and social previews; skip a dedicated Discover editorial calendar.
Ship a large image and allow large previews
Give every article a large, representative image at least 1200 pixels wide, and allow large previews with the robots meta tag. Google recommends images at least 1200 px wide with more than 300,000 total pixels, enabled by max-image-preview:large or AMP, and recommends a 16:9 ratio, which Google tries to crop to automatically (Get on Discover).
<meta name="robots" content="max-image-preview:large">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/img/story-1200x675.webp">- Specify the image in
og:imageor schema.org markup. Avoid a site logo or a text-heavy image. - Keep the subject inside a 16:9 crop of a vertical image.
- A 1200x630 OG image already meets the width guidance; sizing and generation are in og-images, and alt text, formats, and dimensions in image-seo. Directive details are in robots-directives.
Write titles that match the content
Write a title that states what the page covers, without exaggeration or withheld information. Google’s Discover guidance asks publishers to avoid clickbait and sensationalism in titles, snippets, and images. A story with a specific number or named subject in the title reads as both clear and clickable.
Risk note: Google’s Discover content policies bar preview content that promises details the article does not deliver, and repeated violations can make a site ineligible for Discover, with manual actions shown in Search Console. See seo-myths.
Publish timely, original, in-depth content
Prioritize original reporting and analysis on current topics, written by people with expertise in the subject. Google’s February 2026 Discover core update, released February 5, 2026 for English-language users in the US, aimed to show more locally relevant content, less sensational content and clickbait, and more in-depth, original, and timely content from sites with expertise in a topic. Author and publisher signals are covered in e-e-a-t; news-specific markup and timestamps in news-seo. How core updates behave and what to do after a drop are in core-updates.
Measure in the Search Console Discover report
Use Performance > Discover to see impressions, clicks, and CTR by page. The report appears only after a property reaches a minimum number of Discover impressions over the last 3 months, and rows below a threshold are hidden but counted in totals (Search Console Help). Discover has its own generative AI performance view as well. A missing report usually means the site has too few Discover impressions to show one. The wider walkthrough is in master-google-search-console.