What is Google Discover and how to optimize your website for Google Discover?

Discover is part of Google Search. Google Discover shows content relevant to people's interests, based on their web and app activity.

What content is eligible to appear in Discover?

If Google indexes a piece of content and it also meets Discover's policies, it's automatically eligible to appear on Discover. Discover doesn't require content to be specially tagged or have certain structured data. However, being eligible to appear doesn't guarantee that content will appear on Discover.

Content that may appear in Discover includes a wide range of topics that match a person's interests. Older content may also appear if it is useful and relevant to an individual based on their interests.

It's important to note that if your site violates one or more of Discover's content policies, it may be flagged in Discover's Privacy and Actions section.

As part of Google Search, Discover uses many of the same signals and systems as Search to determine what content is useful and human-oriented. So those who want to succeed with Discover should create content that is useful, trustworthy, and human-oriented.

Increase the likelihood of content appearing in Discover

Google offers a few recommendations to increase the likelihood of a piece of content appearing in Discover:

First, you need to use a page title that reflects the nature of the content, not “clickbait”.

Second, content that uses high-quality, engaging images, especially large images, is more likely to generate traffic from Discover. Large images should be at least 1200 px wide and enabled with the “max-image-preview:large” setting or by using AMP (optimized images for mobile). Avoid using your site logo as an image.

Third, avoid tactics that artificially increase engagement by using misleading or exaggerated details in preview content (headlines, snippets, or images) or by failing to reveal information that is most important to understanding the content.

Fourth, it is also necessary to avoid manipulative tactics using inappropriate, provocative, or infuriating details.

Fifth, it is necessary to provide timely content to meet new user interests, tell a good story or provide unique insights.

To provide a good user experience, Discover tries to present relevant content in its feed based on interests, such as articles and videos , and filters out content that is undesirable or potentially confusing to readers. For example, Discover may not recommend job applications, petitions, forms, code repositories, or satire without context. Discover uses SafeSearch but still filters out content that may be shocking or surprising.