Google Discover is the feed of articles and videos that Google shows on your phone without you having searched for anything. You'll find it in the Google app, under the search bar on google.com on mobile and, on many Android phones, by swiping right from the home screen. It picks content based on the interests Google infers from your account's Web & App Activity, not on a query.
For anyone running a website this means one specific thing: you don't rank on Discover for a keyword, you get shown to people Google thinks are interested in a topic. The eligibility rules are few and public. What changed in 2026 is everything else: the first core update dedicated to Discover alone, more room for YouTube, X and AI-generated summaries, and a new way of measuring the feed in Search Console.
Below you'll find the technical requirements, traffic figures with the market they were measured in, and the most common reasons a site doesn't show up.
How Google Discover works
In classic search the user types a question and Google ranks the pages that answer it. In Discover there's no question: Google estimates what might interest someone and shows them cards with a headline, an image and the site's name. Users can follow a topic, say they're not interested or hide a source, and the feed adapts.
This shifts SEO work in two ways. Keywords matter little, while topic, headline and image matter a lot, because they're what the user sees before deciding whether to tap the card. And traffic is uneven: Google's official documentation says Discover traffic is less predictable than search traffic, because it depends on changing interests and on system updates.
One figure helps explain who searches for this topic in the UK. "Google discover" averaged 1,900 searches a month on Google UK over the past twelve months, according to Google Ads data we pulled through DataForSEO on 10 October 2026. The related searches with real volume are almost all from users: "google discover not working" (170), "turn off google discover" (140), "how to turn off google discover" (70). "Google discover seo" gets 20. Site owners are a minority, and the first page of Google UK shows it: on 10 October 2026 it mixed guides for publishers with how-to videos on switching the feed on and a Reddit thread.
Requirements for appearing on Google Discover
Google sums them up like this: a page is eligible if it's indexed and meets the content policies. There are no special tags, inclusion requests or dedicated structured data. Then there are the recommendations, which make the difference between being eligible and actually being shown.
| Element | What Google asks for | How to check it |
|---|---|---|
| Indexing | The page must be in Google's index | URL Inspection in Search Console |
| Main image | At least 1,200 pixels wide and 300,000 pixels in total, 16:9 ratio recommended | Actual size of the file used as the featured image |
| Large preview | max-image-preview:large setting or AMP | Meta robots in the source code |
| Declared image | schema.org markup or og:image tag | Source code or Rich Results Test |
| Headline | Must capture the essence of the content, without clickbait | Editorial review |
| Honest preview | No misleading or exaggerated details in headline, snippet and image | Editorial review |
| Page experience | A page that's good to use overall | Core Web Vitals, mobile testing |
The image is the most neglected lever on business websites. Many WordPress themes use the logo or an 800-pixel square graphic as the featured image: for Discover that means a small card, or no card at all. You'll find details on formats and file sizes in our guide to image optimisation for SEO. As for max-image-preview:large, Yoast SEO already adds it to the meta robots tag, but check the source: a caching plugin or a theme that rewrites the head is enough to lose it.
The same Google page also lists content not to push towards the feed, such as forms, job applications, petitions, code repositories and satire without context. They're useful pages, but they aren't "interests" to suggest to someone scrolling on their phone.
The February 2026 Discover core update
On 5 February 2026 Google announced the first core update dedicated to Discover alone. Until then the feed had been affected by general search core updates. The aims stated in the Google Search Central post are these:
- show more locally relevant content, from sites based in the user's country;
- reduce sensationalist content and clickbait;
- give more room to in-depth, original and timely content from sites with demonstrated expertise in a topic.
The rollout only covered English-speaking users in the United States. On the Search Status Dashboard the update took 21 days and 17 hours, finishing at the end of February. Google said it would extend it to all countries and languages in the following months. When we checked on 10 October 2026, the dashboard listed no separate rollout for other markets, so there is no official date for the UK.
It matters anyway, for three reasons. The direction is stated, and what Google rewards in the US is what will arrive here. The country criterion is especially relevant in the UK, where readers share a language with the US: it should favour UK-based sites writing for a UK audience over American pages that rank here simply because they're in English. And "demonstrated expertise in a topic" means a site that covers everything starts at a disadvantage against one that covers a few subjects well: it's the principle of E-E-A-T applied to the feed.
A note on the first page of Google UK: on 10 October 2026 we looked at the results for "google discover" and "how to get on google discover". The eight guides in the organic results carried dates between December 2019 and July 2025, so none of them can cover this update. If you follow those checklists, you're working to pre-2026 rules. To understand how to read a core update when it lands, see our article on Google algorithm updates.
How much traffic Discover brings: the figures, market by market
Almost all public data on Discover comes from news publishers and international samples. We found no public UK figure for the share of traffic that comes from Discover. That's why we report each number with its market and sample next to it: a figure measured on American newspapers doesn't tell you what Discover is worth to a UK business site.
| What it measures | Value | Market and sample | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Share of Google traffic to publishers that comes from Discover | about 75% (Q2 2026) | Over 400 news publishers, global | NewzDash |
| Share of web search in the same traffic | from 51% (2023) to 27% (Q4 2025) | Over 400 news publishers, global | NewzDash |
| Change in Discover clicks, Nov 2024 - Nov 2025 | -21% global, -29% United States, -18% Europe | 2,576 news sites | Chartbeat in the Reuters Institute 2026 report |
| Change in organic search clicks, same period | -33% global, -38% United States, -17% Europe | 2,576 news sites | Chartbeat in the Reuters Institute 2026 report |
| Discover clicks compared with search | about double globally; level in the United States for news and media | Raptive network of sites | Raptive |
| Share of Google traffic that comes from Discover, by vertical | news 76%; tech, gaming, sport and travel about 50%; food 2% | Raptive network of sites | Raptive |
| Feed cards taken up by AI summaries | 51% | United States, Brazil, Mexico | Marfeel |
| AI summaries leading to a YouTube video rather than a publisher | 77% | United States | Marfeel |
The rows to read together are NewzDash's and Chartbeat's. Discover's share of publishers' Google traffic has gone up, but clicks in absolute terms have gone down. Discover weighs more because classic search fell faster, largely because of AI Overviews and the rise of zero-click searches. If you read "Discover is three quarters of Google traffic" as growth in the channel, you've misread it. In Europe, the closest sample to the UK, the two channels fell by about the same amount: -18% for Discover, -17% for search.
The second point is the vertical. In the Raptive network Discover brings 76% of Google traffic to news sites and 2% to recipe sites. For a B2B company publishing technical guides, the realistic share is much closer to the second figure than the first.
For UK context, Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report has two useful figures. Smartphones accounted for 77% of UK adults' time online in May 2025, up from 75% a year earlier, and that's the device Discover lives on. Google Search reached 82% of UK online adults, and Google was used by 32% of adults as a route to news, second only to Meta at 40%. Discover is part of that route: many people use it every day without knowing it has a name.
YouTube, X and AI summaries: who you're competing with in the feed
Until a couple of years ago the feed was made up almost entirely of articles. Marfeel, which monitors Discover for publishers, found that in the United States, Brazil and Mexico 51% of cards are AI-generated summaries, and that beyond the twentieth position the share rises to 82.7%. In the United States, 77% of those summaries lead to a YouTube video played inside the feed and 23% to a publisher's site.
No equivalent measurement is public for the UK. The closest European example we found comes from Italy: in March 2026, at a meeting with Italian publishers, Marta Rocamora of Marfeel showed the ranking of the most visible domains on Discover in Italy over the previous thirty days. Three national newspapers led, with YouTube in fourth place and X in fifth (according to Bruno D'Amico's write-up). At the same meeting Marco Baldini of Hearst Italia described working on short content made specifically for the feed.
There are two practical consequences. If you have a video channel, your videos can get into the feed on their own, and YouTube SEO becomes a way to be on Discover even when your articles aren't. And social posts now count in a new way, which you'll see in the section on measurement below and which ties in with what we've written about social media SEO.
How to optimise content for Discover
Choose topics you genuinely know about
Discover suggests content linked to the interests a person follows. A site with a long track record on a few topics is more likely to be associated with those interests, and the 2026 core update puts this in writing. Ten solid articles on one topic are worth more than ten articles on ten different topics.
Write headlines that say what's inside
The headline is half the card. A headline that names the fact and who it matters to works better than a vague question or a promise that only the click completes, which is exactly the kind of preview the update wants to cut back. The rules for writing a good meta title apply here too, with one difference: on Discover the headline has to win over someone who wasn't looking for anything.
Use large, original images
At least 1,200 pixels wide, 16:9 format, max-image-preview:large switched on. A real photo of the product, the site or the person you're writing about draws more attention than a stock image the user has already seen elsewhere. Never use the logo as the featured image.
Publish when interest is there, update when it comes back
Google rewards timely content, but its documentation also says older content can appear if it's useful for someone's interests. For a business that isn't a publisher, the way in is to update your guides when the topic becomes current again: a new regulation, a grant scheme, a season. We measured the difference between content that lasts and spikes that fade in our article on evergreen and viral content.
Look after the page after the click
People arriving from Discover are on mobile and have no intention of searching: if the page is slow or covered by a pop-up, they go back to the feed. Google asks for a good page experience overall, and Core Web Vitals are the most concrete way to measure it.
Make it clear who's writing
Author name, a bio with role and experience, an author page, the update date in view. In the code, Article markup with the author declared: we explain how to set it up in our guide to schema markup.
How to measure traffic from Google Discover
Google Search Console has a Discover report in the Performance section. It shows impressions, clicks and CTR for the last 16 months and includes traffic from Chrome. There are no queries, because there aren't any. The report only appears once the site passes a minimum impressions threshold, so many small sites never see it: that doesn't necessarily mean zero traffic.
GA4 has no Discover channel. Some clicks arrive without a referrer and end up as direct or unassigned traffic; others have android-app://com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox/ as the referrer, the identifier of the Google app on Android (Netpeak documents this too). To isolate it you need an exploration filtered on that referrer, to compare with Search Console clicks so you can see how much goes missing. If your Google Analytics set-up is still the default one, this is the first report to add.
What's new in 2026 is platform properties. In July Google extended to all countries the option to connect YouTube, TikTok, X and Instagram profiles to Search Console and see how that content performs on Search, Discover and Google News. When we set it up for a client in August 2026, the Discover and Google News tabs were only available for YouTube and X. If you have an active channel, it's the first official way to know whether a video or a post is circulating in the feed.
Why your site doesn't appear on Discover
When a site doesn't appear, or used to and no longer does, these are the causes we see most often.
- The site is below the report threshold: there may be traffic, but Search Console doesn't show it.
- Featured images are under 1,200 pixels, or the meta robots tag limits the preview.
- The site mostly publishes service pages, product pages or corporate pages, which rarely match an interest anyone follows.
- Headlines are generic or, at the other extreme, inflated: in the first case nobody taps the card, in the second Google stops showing it.
- There's a policy or quality problem, including manual actions: check the Security and Manual Actions section of Search Console, and see the cases in our guide to Google penalties.
- Traffic collapsed within a few days: it could be a system update or a change in what the audience is interested in. The method for telling them apart is the same one we use for a website traffic drop.
Who Discover is worth it for, and who it isn't
Guides rarely say it, but for most B2B companies Discover is a secondary channel. The feed is mostly news outlets, entertainment, technology, sport and travel. If you sell machinery, business software or consultancy, your audience is too narrow for Google to treat it as an interest to feed every day, and the 2% for food in the Raptive network shows that even very popular sectors can be left almost entirely out.
It's worth the effort if you publish regularly on topics with a broad, recurring audience, if you have a YouTube channel or if Search Console already shows Discover impressions. Otherwise the same energy pays off more in classic search and in visibility in AI answers, where the demand is explicit and measurable. There's also a paid route, Google Ads Demand Gen campaigns, which can show ads in the feed. Working out which of these channels has room for your site is the starting point of our SEO service.
Frequently asked questions about Google Discover
It's Google's personalised feed that shows articles and videos based on the user's interests, without needing to search. You'll find it in the Google app, on google.com on mobile and, on many Android phones, by swiping right from the home screen.
In the Google app: tap your profile picture, open Settings, then General, and switch on Discover. You turn it off from the same menu. You manage the topics to follow or hide directly from the cards in the feed.
No. Discover and Google News are separate products. For Discover the page only needs to be indexed and to meet Google's content policies: there are no inclusion requests or dedicated tags.
Not much. Discover doesn't answer a query, so there's no keyword to rank for. What matters is the topic, the headline, the image and how closely the site is associated with that subject. Keywords remain decisive for classic search, which brings the most stable traffic.
Not officially yet. The rollout of 5 February 2026 covered English-speaking users in the United States. Google said it would extend it to all countries and languages, but as of 10 October 2026 the Search Status Dashboard shows no separate rollout for the UK.
Yes, but as an ad. Google Ads Demand Gen campaigns can show ads in the Discover feed. Organic cards can't be bought: you only get there with content that's eligible and interesting to people scrolling the feed.
Because the site hasn't yet passed the minimum impressions threshold Google requires to show the report. That doesn't necessarily mean zero traffic: data below the threshold isn't shown as individual rows.
