What Discover is and why it matters
Google Discover is the personalised content feed on Android home screens and the Google app. It's powered by Google's understanding of user interests, not by search queries. For publishers, lifestyle brands and content sites, Discover can deliver 5-10x the traffic of traditional organic search, with spikes that can take a single article to a million pageviews overnight.
The eligibility rules
Not every site qualifies for Discover. You need Google News inclusion or strong E-E-A-T signals. Your site must be mobile-friendly. Your content must be original, fresh and on topics with audience interest. Sites that produce thin content, scraped content or rewrites of other sites' articles are invisible in Discover by design.
Image: the most important Discover signal
Discover is a visual feed. The image is the click. Use high-resolution images (1200x675 minimum), enable max-image-preview:large in robots meta, ensure the image is relevant to the article (not a stock photo). Articles with great images get 10x the Discover impressions of articles with weak images. This is the single biggest lever you have.
Headline craft
Discover headlines are competing for attention in a feed, not for a keyword. Front-load the value. Use specifics, not generalities. Avoid clickbait — Google's quality systems detect it and demote the article. The headline that wins in Discover is the one that promises a specific, valuable insight a real human wants right now.
Freshness
Discover heavily favours fresh content. Articles get most of their Discover traffic in the first 48 hours after publication. If your editorial cadence is weekly, you're leaving traffic on the table. Daily publishing (with quality maintained) is the rhythm Discover rewards.
Topical authority
Discover surfaces articles from sites it trusts on the topic. Publish consistently on a coherent topic cluster and your Discover surface for that cluster grows. Jump topics constantly and Discover never builds confidence in you for any of them. Pick your lanes, own them, and the Discover algorithm will start sending traffic.
Measurement
Search Console has a dedicated Discover report. Watch the impressions, CTR and top pages. The pages that earn Discover impressions are the ones that match user interest patterns in your topic area — study them and produce more of that exact shape. Discover is unpredictable but pattern-able.