News SEO: Google News, Top stories and Discover for publishers

Where news appears in Google

Google shows news in several places, and each works a little differently. Top stories is a section that “may appear within Google Search when we detect a search query is news-oriented.” Google is clear that “Content is automatically selected for this feature.” The News tab is a filter: “When users look for news, the News tab of Search filters search results.” Google News (news.google.com and the apps) is a separate product, and Discover is an interest-based feed that people see without typing a query.

None of these surfaces needs a sign-up. “Google may find your site through our normal web crawl.” Google News Showcase is the exception: it is a programme for participating publishers, not an organic ranking surface.

This lesson covers the publisher side. For how these features look on the results page, see the lesson Search results, AI Overviews and Discover.

What Google officially says

Google lists the factors that influence ranking in Google News: relevance of content, prominence, authoritativeness, freshness, usability, and location and language. It also warns that “Having eligible content isn’t a guarantee that content will necessarily rank well on Google News.” Eligibility gets you into the pool. Quality and authority decide where you appear in it.

One technical point surprises people: “Note that blocking Googlebot-News excludes your content from Google News.” If you block that crawler in robots.txt to save crawl load, you opt out of Google News as well.

Eligibility and Google News content policies

The policy rule is short: “To be eligible to appear in Google News or news surfaces, content should follow best practices for article pages and must not violate Google Search’s overall policies, Google Search’s spam policies, or these policies for Search features”. Those Search feature policies cover dangerous, deceptive, harassing, hateful, manipulated, medical, sexually explicit, violent extremist and violent or gory content, and vulgar language.

On top of that, Google News has three policies of its own:

Consequences go from removing single articles to the whole site: “In cases of repeated or egregious violations, a site may be no longer eligible to appear on our news surfaces.” Violations can show up as manual actions under Security & Manual actions in Search Console. Note that “These policies only apply to news surfaces.” A site that loses news eligibility can still rank in regular web results.

Sponsored and partner content also sits close to the site reputation abuse policy. If you host third-party content, read the lesson Site reputation abuse before you publish it.

Transparency: bylines, authors and contact

Google explains why this policy exists: “Visitors to your site want to trust and understand who writes and publishes the content they read.” News sources should provide:

• “Clear dates and bylines”
• “Information about the authors, publication, and publisher”
• “Information about the company or network behind the content”
• “Contact information”

Google's blog post on the policy describes two levels. At article level: “This includes information like an article byline (that often links to a bio describing the author’s credentials and expertise), the article’s publishing date, and labeling to indicate the article type, for example Opinion or News.” At site level it lists things like “a mission statement, editorial policies and standards, staff information and bios for both editorial and business staff, non-generic contact information”, plus owners and funding sources.

In practice, that means:

• Every article has a bylinelinked to an author page with a photo, role, beat, background and contact or social links.
• Article type is labelledNews, Opinion, Analysis, Sponsored. Readers should never have to guess.
• An About pagenames the publisher, the company behind it and who owns or funds it.
• An editorial policycovers sourcing, corrections, fact-checking and how AI tools are used, if they are.
• Real contact detailsa newsroom email and address, not only a generic form.

Google also allows for local conditions. It considers regional expectations, “This is particularly important in areas with less press freedom where practices like naming a journalist can carry significant risk.” A desk byline such as Staff reporter can be legitimate there, as long as the publication itself is transparent. The lesson Authors, About and editorial policy goes deeper into these pages.

Dates and updates done right

Dates are where news sites get into the most trouble, often by accident. Google News is strict: “To be considered in Google News, articles need to show both a clear, visible date and time. Ideally, these should be between the headline and the article text.”

For Search in general, “Google doesn't depend on a single date factor because all factors can be prone to issues.” So you send the same date in several places and keep them consistent:

1. Visible date and time, labelled. Google's advice: “Label your dates appropriately with text like "Publish" or "Last updated".” For example: Published 30 Oct 2026, 08:00 CET · Updated 11:20 CET.
2. Structured data with datePublished and dateModified in ISO 8601 with a timezone, for example 2026-10-30T08:00:00+01:00.
3. The news sitemap with the original publication date.
4. Consistency. “Make your dates and times consistent.” The visible date and the markup date must match.
5. No future dates, no event dates. “Don't specify future dates, or the date of the action described on the page.” An article about a match next Saturday is dated when you published it.
6. Few other dates on the page. Lists of related stories with their own dates near the headline can confuse date extraction.

Updating is fine; faking freshness is not. Google says “it’s against our guidelines to artificially freshen a story when the publisher didn't add significant information or demonstrated a compelling reason.” It also names a common trick explicitly: “It’s also against our guidelines to create a very slightly updated story from a previously published one, then delete the old story and redirect to the new one.”

Article markup for news pages

Markup is not an entry ticket. Google says: “While there's no markup requirement to be eligible for Google News features like Top stories, you can add Article to more explicitly tell Google what your content is about”. Use NewsArticle for news, BlogPosting for blog posts and Article otherwise. “There are no required properties; instead, add the properties that apply to your content.”

The properties that matter for news are headline, image, datePublished, dateModified and author with name and url. Google recommends several high-resolution images in 16x9, 4x3 and 1x1. For authors: “Make sure that all the authors that are presented as authors on the web page are also included in markup.” List each author separately, put only the name in author.name and link to the author page.

Google News adds its own article page advice: “Headlines should not exceed 110 characters.” “Match the title of your article page (in the HTML <title> tag) to the title of your article (in <h1> or equivalent).” “Do not include a date or time in your article title.” For images: “Use images that are relevant to the story, rather than logos or captions.”

One more rule for long articles split over pages: “For multi-part articles, make sure that the rel=canonical points at either each individual page or a "view-all" page (and not to page 1 of a multi-part series).”

For the general rules of JSON-LD, validation and testing, see the lesson Structured data.

News sitemaps

A news sitemap is a normal XML sitemap with extra news: tags. You can add the tags to your existing sitemap or keep a separate one. A separate file is easier to track in Search Console. The rules, as Google documents them:

• Only fresh articles.“Only include recent URLs for articles that were created in the last two days.” After that, remove the URL or its <news:news> block.
• One file, updated in place.“Update your news sitemap with fresh articles as they're published. Don't create a new sitemap with each update.”
• Size limit.“a sitemap may have up to 1,000 news:news tags.” Split into several sitemaps if you publish more.
• Exact publication name.news:name “must exactly match the name as it appears on your articles on news.google.com, omitting anything in parentheses.”
• Original date.“Specify the original date and time when the article was first published on your site. Don't specify the time when you added the article to your sitemap.”
• Clean title.“Don't include the author name, publication name, or publication date in the <news:title> tag.”
• An empty file is fine.On quiet days the sitemap may be empty. Search Console may warn you, but “It won't cause any problems with Google Search if the file is empty.”

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/local/tram-line-approved/</loc>
    <news:news>
      <news:publication>
        <news:name>Example Daily</news:name>
        <news:language>en</news:language>
      </news:publication>
      <news:publication_date>2026-10-30T08:00:00+01:00</news:publication_date>
      <news:title>Council approves new tram line</news:title>
    </news:news>
  </url>
</urlset>

Generate the file from your CMS, never by hand, and list it in robots.txt and in Search Console. Your main XML sitemap still lists every article, old and new. General sitemap rules are in the lesson XML sitemaps.

Paywalls, flexible sampling and paywalled content markup

A paywall and good visibility can live together, but only if Google can read the full article and knows that part of it is locked for users. Showing Googlebot the full text while users see a paywall looks like cloaking unless you mark it up. That is exactly what the markup is for: “This structured data helps Google differentiate paywalled content from the practice of cloaking, which violates spam policies.”

How much to show: flexible sampling

Google describes two sampling models. Metering “provides users with a quota of articles to consume before requiring users to subscribe or log in”. Lead-in “offers a portion of an article's content without it being shown in full.” On metering, Google's view is: “In general, we think that monthly, rather than daily metering provides more flexibility and a safer environment for testing.” It gives a range as a starting point: “for most daily news publishers, we expect the value to fall between 6 and 10 articles per user per month.” Google stresses that the final number is the publisher's choice, so test changes carefully and watch referral traffic and conversion.

How to mark it up

Wrap the locked part of the article in an element with a class, then reference that class in NewsArticle markup with isAccessibleForFree: false and a hasPart block.

<head>
  <script type="application/ld+json">
  {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "NewsArticle",
    "headline": "Council approves new tram line",
    "datePublished": "2026-10-30T08:00:00+01:00",
    "author": [{ "@type": "Person", "name": "Jane Doe",
                 "url": "https://example.com/staff/jane-doe/" }],
    "isAccessibleForFree": false,
    "hasPart": {
      "@type": "WebPageElement",
      "isAccessibleForFree": false,
      "cssSelector": ".paywall"
    }
  }
  </script>
</head>
<body>
  <p>The lead: free for everyone.</p>
  <div class="paywall">
    <!-- the rest of the article, for subscribers -->
  </div>
</body>

Rules from Google's documentation: “Only use .class selectors for the cssSelector property.” “Don't nest content sections.” If you have several locked sections, list them as an array in hasPart. Make sure Googlebot, and Googlebot-News, can actually fetch the full text, and check it with URL Inspection. If you still run AMP pages: “Ensure that your bot access policy is the same for AMP and non-AMP pages”.

If you do not want the locked text indexed at all, you do not need this markup. Choose a paywall that does not send the text to the browser, and accept that Google only sees the free part.

Live coverage, evergreen hubs and topic authority

Live coverage

Google's current documentation has no special live-blog rich result, so treat live coverage as an editorial and URL question, not a markup trick. Practice that works: keep one stable URL for a running story, update it with time-stamped entries, keep the headline current and show the update time. Avoid publishing a new URL every hour with the same story; that is close to the “slightly updated story” pattern Google warns about. When the event ends, turn the live page into a clean summary or link it to the follow-up article.

Evergreen hubs and topic pages

News articles fade within days. Evergreen pages keep working: explainers (for example, What the tram project is and what it costs), timelines, guides and topic hubs such as example.com/topics/tram-project/. A good hub has its own introduction, the key facts kept up to date, and a curated list of coverage. Link every new story to its hub and the hub back to the latest stories. Over time the hub collects links and ranks for the broad query, while the articles rank for the news moment.

Keep the number of tag pages under control. A CMS that creates a tag page for every name produces hundreds of thin pages with one or two articles each. Curate a set of real topic pages and noindex or merge the rest.

Topic authority

Depth on a topic is something Google measures for news. “Google developed a system called topic authority that helps determine which expert sources are helpful to someone’s newsy query in certain specialized topic areas, such as health, politics, or finance.” The signals Google names include how notable a source is for a topic or location, original reporting that others cite, and source reputation. Google's advice is plain: “Publishers looking for success with topic authority should do exactly what their publications would normally do: provide great coverage about the areas and topics they know well.” For a local paper, that means owning local coverage instead of rewriting national news. The lesson Topical authority covers the general idea.

Discover: images, headlines and clickbait

Discover has no special entry point either: “Content is automatically eligible to appear in Discover if it is indexed by Google and meets Discover's content policies. No special tags or structured data are required.” What helps is mostly the image and the honesty of the headline.

<meta name="robots" content="max-image-preview:large">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/img/tram-line-1600x900.jpg">

Plan for volatility. Google says “you should consider traffic from Discover as supplemental to your keyword-driven search traffic.” Discover traffic can swing because interests change, because the feed changes the content types it shows, and after Search updates. Do not build the business on it.

AMP is no longer required

For years, Top stories meant AMP. That changed with the page experience update in 2021. Google wrote: “This means that using the AMP format is no longer required and that any page, irrespective of its Core Web Vitals score or page experience status, will be eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel.”

AMP still works: Google indexes AMP pages like any other page. But if you keep AMP only for Top stories, you can retire it. Plan that as a migration: redirect AMP URLs to the canonical articles and remove the amphtml links. A fast, stable standard page is enough; see the lesson Core Web Vitals for the performance side.

Measuring: Search Console News and Discover reports

News traffic is split across three places in Search Console, and mixing them up is a common reporting error.

In all three reports metrics are credited to the canonical URL, not to the URL the user landed on. Practical habits: compare article performance in the first 48 hours, track Discover separately from Search, and look at which topics bring repeat visibility. That tells you where your topic authority is.

A newsroom SEO workflow

1. Plan. Decide what people will search for, the angle only you can bring and which hub the story belongs to.
2. Build the page. A specific headline under 110 characters, the same in the H1 and the title tag; byline with author link; labelled date and time; a relevant lead image of 1200 px or wider.
3. Publish. The template outputs NewsArticle markup, the CMS adds the URL to the news sitemap, and the robots meta allows large image previews.
4. Link. Section page, topic hub, and related earlier stories link to the new article, and it links back to the hub.
5. Update. Substantial changes update the visible time and dateModified; corrections get a visible note. No re-publishing under a new URL.
6. Measure and refresh. Check Search Console reports, then refresh the evergreen hub with what the story added.

Common mistakes

• ✕Blocking Googlebot-NewsDone to save crawl load, it removes the site from Google News.
• ✕No visible time, or dates that disagreeOnly a date, or a visible date that differs from datePublished and the sitemap.
• ✕Fake freshnessBumping the update time for trivial edits, or republishing a story under a new URL and redirecting the old one.
• ✕Anonymous contentNo bylines, no author pages, no About page or real contact details.
• ✕Unlabelled sponsored contentPaid articles that look like independent reporting.
• ✕Paywall without markupGooglebot sees the full text, users see a wall, and nothing explains the difference.
• ✕Stale news sitemapOld articles left in it, a new file for every update, or a publication name that does not match.
• ✕Logo as preview imageA generic or text-heavy image in og:image, or large previews not allowed.
• ✕Clickbait headlinesPromises the article does not deliver, which conflicts with both the misleading content policy and Discover advice.
• ✕Thousands of thin tag pagesAuto-generated tags instead of a curated set of topic hubs.

FAQ

Sources

• Google Publisher Center Help — News content across Google
• Google Publisher Center Help — Google News policies
• Google Publisher Center Help — Ranking within Google News
• Google Publisher Center Help — Best practices for your article pages
• Google Search Central Blog — Understanding the sources behind Google News
• Google Search Central — Influence your byline dates
• Google Search Central — Article structured data
• Google Search Central — News sitemaps
• Google Search Central — Subscription and paywalled content
• Google Search Central — Flexible sampling
• Google Search Central — Discover and your website
• Google Search Central Blog — Understanding news topic authority
• Google Search Central Blog — More details on the page experience update
• Search Console Help — Performance report (Google News)
• Search Console Help — Performance report (Discover)

Quotes checked against the official pages on 30 October 2026.