Many publishers are increasingly reliant on Google Discover for their daily traffic numbers, but some are playing a risky game.

Discover is a feed of recommended articles that users of Android phones see when they open their browser, or iPhone users in their Google app.

The articles recommended by Discover align with what Google knows about each user’s interests, favourite websites, and recent searches. This results in a highly personalised feed full of content the user is likely to click on and read.

Google says that any article has a chance to appear in Discover, as long as it aligns with their content and quality policies. These are vaguely worded, but are almost identical to Google’s content policies for news.

For many news publishers around the world Google Discover is now their primary source of traffic. Research from NewzDash, a news performance monitoring tool, shows that on average Discover accounts for 55% of publishers’ total Google traffic. This is up from 41% in a previous study.

With Google as the dominant source of traffic to most publishers, this means Discover is the single largest channel sending visitors to publishing sites.

Clickbait headlines about personal finance seem to work on Discover

Yet it’s a risky strategy to rely on Discover traffic. Several Googlers are on record saying sites shouldn’t rely on Discover. In my own experience working with publishers around the world, Discover is a highly volatile channel that can send massively different traffic numbers from one day to the next.

Additionally, Discover is especially susceptible to the whims of Google’s algorithm updates. Sites can see their entire Discover traffic evaporate overnight, without any explanation or underlying cause, just because Google has decided to slightly tweak its algorithmic levers.

Yet the temptation to maximise Discover traffic is too great for many publishers.

Once a publisher finds a specific topic that consistently generates significant visitor numbers from Discover, it’s seductive to go all-in on that topic and generate daily articles even if there’s very little of substance to say.

This is evident in the daily output of many British publishing sites. Topics that are popular on Discover – especially so-called YMYL (Your Money Your Life, content focused on personal finance and health) – are covered on a daily basis.

These articles often feature headlines that seem designed not to rank in Google’s regular search ecosystem, where straightforward factual headlines tend to win, but to elicit clicks with emotive phrasing bordering on outright clickbait.

And these tactics work. For a while at least.

Creating content for Google Discover could be race to the bottom

Creating content optimised only for Discover is a race to the bottom, with articles making promises with attractive headlines yet barely containing any meaningful information churned out by the hundreds on a daily basis by many large UK news websites.

We’ve been through this hamster wheel before, and it didn’t end well. Not so long ago, many publishers chased after Google search clicks with similar articles around celebrities’ net worth, bizarre ‘scandals’ that were often entirely invented, filler content around the latest Google doodle, entire pieces extracting the deepest insights from a D-list celebrity’s whimsical social media comment, and more of such churnalism intended purely to drive clicks from Google’s search results.

All this backfired spectacularly when Google started rolling out algorithm updates designed to deprive such content of visibility in their search results. Publishers experienced first-hand how fickle Google’s whims can be, when content that was previously almost pinned to the top of Google’s news carousels suddenly became toxic and actively harmful for a website’s long-term viability.

I fear we may soon go through the exact same with Discover. In fact, I’ve already seen publishers suffer greatly at the hands of Google’s ‘Helpful Content Updates’, which are now part of their core algorithms. More sites seem destined to follow.

Chasing after Discover clicks is likely to be another short-lived tactic for publishers desperate to claim as many visits as possible in the short term, regardless of the potential long-term effects their site may suffer.

Some publishers with multiple news websites under their wing may see this as an acceptable risk. If one site gets hit by an algorithm update, they’ve learned exactly where to draw the line and can amend their tactics on another site.

But if your portfolio of news sites is small, taking such risks is highly irresponsible. The effects of an algorithm update can be devastating and extremely hard to recover from.

Sustainable tactics for Google Discover require genuine effort

A more viable approach to Discover, which is also recommended by Google, is to see visits from this channel as ‘bonus traffic’. When advising clients, I often recommend putting Discover visits into a separate bucket entirely, separating it from your site’s core traffic channels.

There are ways to optimise for Discover in a sustainable fashion. While there will always be a degree of volatility to the channel’s daily numbers, with the right approach you can ensure your continued presence on people’s feed. Not every article will be a champion, but you can increase the probability of driving meaningful visits from Discover without risking an algorithmic backlash at a future date.

Reliable Discover optimisation tactics centre around content focusing on people’s needs and interests, while providing real value and insights.

The concept of ‘information gain’ is critical to success in Discover as well as in Google’s broader news rankings. Information gain is about adding knowledge and insight to a news topic. If you’re merely reporting what others are also saying, then your content has low information gain. If, however, you can bring something new to the table – a different perspective, fresh information not previously covered, or an expert opinion – then you are contributing to the topic’s overall knowledge and have created information gain.

Combine this with headlines that find a balance between factual and emotive, good images to attract attention without resorting to fakery, and an excellent user experience that encourages visitors to return to your site, and you have an excellent recipe for sustained success in Discover.

Winning in Google’s rapidly changing search ecosystem has never been more challenging. Publishers should be wary of chasing after cheap clicks, be that on Discover or on search, as that approach has repeatedly shown to be a dead end.

It takes genuine effort to build a news brand that your users will want to engage with time and again. This is true on every channel where your audience reads your content, and Discover is no exception.

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Now that we’re nearly a month onwards from Google’s official launch of AI Overviews (at least, in the US – the rest of the world is still waiting), we’re getting more data about when these AI-generated text snippets appear and how they change the traffic that publishers get from Google.

When an AI Overview appears on a query, it takes up most of the space at the top of a Google search result. This will push the regular organic results down quite a bit, far enough that most users will have to scroll to see them.

(See Press Gazette’s in-depth report here on the impact which AI Overviews has had on publisher visibility on Google in the US.)

We know from previous research done on click-through rates from search results that the further down a link sits on a Google results page, the fewer clicks it gets. The prominence of AI Overviews means that regular organic results below it are likely to suffer painful decreases in traffic, as much as a quarter or more of their existing organic Google clicks.

Now, AI Overviews do show source links as well, which users could click on. This may alleviate some of the pain, were it not for the fact that many of the cited sources aren’t webpages that show in the top ten organic results. The source links in AI Overviews have much greater diversity, something Google has admitted themselves.

So websites that have worked hard to get their pages into Google’s top ten may see most of that effort wasted, as Google will now give lower-ranking pages the opportunity to get clicks from the AI Overview at the top of the result. That is, if users will even click on the source links in the AI Overview in the first place. With the depth and detail of content in the AI Overview, this seems unlikely.

The good news is that AI Overviews, at the moment, don’t appear all that often. The most recent data shows that, after an initial high following Google’s announcement, AI Overviews started showing much less frequently. On average, AI Overviews now appear for around 4% of the tested searches.

(Research commissioned for Press Gazette has found AI Overviews are currently offered for around 10% of leading news search terms in the US).

This seems to be a response to the huge backlash against these AI-generated texts, which regularly contained drastic inaccuracies and sometimes even downright dangerous advice. The glue on pizza example is probably the most notorious.

The criticism was so overwhelming that Google felt the need to publish a damage limitation post in which their VP of Search, Liz Reid, stressed that Google “worked quickly to address these issues, either through improvements to our algorithms or through established processes to remove responses that don’t comply with our policies.”

In that same piece, Reid said that Google aimed to avoid showing AI Overviews for ‘hard news’ topics, where accurate up-to-date information is crucial.

However, the low percentage of AI Overviews and their exclusion from news topics doesn’t mean we’re in the clear. In fact, I’d argue that the hullabaloo about AI Overviews detracts from the real problem publishers should be addressing with Google.

Algorithm updates are biggest threat to publishers

The biggest threat to a publishing site’s traffic is not a new search feature like AI Overviews. Nor is it the site’s own journalistic practices, or its approach to SEO.

Many publishers are, at the very least, doing the basics right: Publishing newsworthy content produced by real journalists according to proper editorial practices and applying a baseline of optimisation to these articles.

However, publishing sites can suddenly find their traffic drastically reduced through no fault of their own. The reason is that Google has rolled out another algorithm update, framed as an attempt to improve search results and reduce spam but in fact often penalising legitimate publishers and causing massive traffic losses.

For some sites, ending up on the wrong end of a Google algorithm update can mean seeing their search traffic halved or losing all of their Discover traffic. These are immensely painful moments for publishers. People lose their jobs when traffic – and, as a result, revenue – suddenly evaporates. Some publishing sites even have to close down entirely.

I regularly get asked to help such sites, to identify a root cause that may have tripped Google’s algorithmic failsafes and caused the site to be interpreted as a source of spam or ‘unhelpful content’.

In most cases, no such root cause exists. The site wasn’t doing anything ‘wrong’, as defined by Google’s woolly-worded guidelines. Yet for some reason, it fell on the wrong side of an algorithm change, as part of Google’s ongoing attempts to salvage its reputation as the world’s best search engine.

By their own admission, Google’s systems aren’t perfect and such collateral damage from an algorithm change is not unexpected. Google asked us to provide examples of sites we feel are unfairly affected via an online feedback form which was briefly advertised on that very authoritative and highly official channel known today as ‘X’. That form has since closed, you’ll not be surprised to hear.

AI Overviews could cause havoc

AI Overviews may yet cause havoc for publisher’s search traffic. Google has the ability to ramp up the appearance of AI Overviews and insert them into nearly every search result.

Users may even prefer these AI generated snippets rather than reading multiple websites to find the information they’re looking for, with all the usability challenges that those websites offer: Cookie consent banners, email signups, pervasive advertising, affiliate links, and endless streams of third party sponsored content.

Google’s reticence to push AI Overviews further shows that, for now, users are not yet sold on the feature. If and when that changes, we’ll quickly know.

But in the meantime, the real threat to websites’ traffic isn’t whatever new shiny toy Google chooses to incorporate into their search results. It’s the less visible, but much more impactful, tinkering that Google’s engineers do behind the scenes with their core algorithm changes.

This is less of a public lightning rod for criticism. After all, Google can easily hide behind their motivations to ‘improve search’ and ‘reduce spam’. If, in the pursuit of such lofty goals, a few websites have to suffer some unfortunate side-effects, well, that’s the cost of getting a better web.

But it shouldn’t be up to Google to decide which websites succeed and which fail. Especially if such decisions are made without proper human oversight. These algorithms are black boxes that punish (and rarely reward) websites on factors that not even Google’s own engineers fully understand.

Imagine living in an enclosure, trapped with countless of your peers and one wild unpredictable animal, which may just ignore you or may at any moment and without any warning decide to eat one of you. That’s basically the state of the web today.

At some point in time we’re going to have to decide to work together and get rid of the animal among us.

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