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In 2025, the rules of search engine optimisation (SEO) for publishers seem to change by the month. A symptom of this change is Google Discover: a personalised, mobile-first content feed that now delivers significant traffic to news publishers and is coming to desktop in the future. Trouble is, Discover operates with opaque logic and sudden shifts, making it hard for newsrooms to adjust.

Lily Ray, VP of SEO strategy and research at marketing agency Amsive, has spent the last 16 months looking at Google Search Console data to get a better idea. She looked at 83 US publisher sites (nearly 5 million URLs) using advanced natural language processing and large language models.

She provided a deep dive of her findings at the News and Editorial SEO Summit 2025 today (21 October 2025) on what’s really working in Google Discover, and how publishers can adapt to its ever-changing landscape.

What do you need to know?

  • Audience: Your typical US Discover user is aged 33–55, earns $40–80k, has a university degree, is budget-conscious, lives in suburban/rural areas (especially southern/Midwest states), and primarily uses Android devices.

  • Hot topics: Extreme weather/disaster, political predictions, celebrity financial drama, economic hardship, wealthy lifestyle extremes, travel dangers, corporate betrayal, international conflict, and health scares perform best in terms of highest click-through rates.

  • People: No surprises here. Donald Trump’s stories had 2.4 times higher Discover penetration and 10,000 times more Discover clicks than any other individual analysed. Stories about Kamala Harris, Elon Musk and Taylor Swift all had at least one third of all their Google traffic come from Discover rather than regular search results. This means that stories about these high-profile figures are especially likely to be seen and clicked on in Discover feeds.

  • No dice: Shopping, business/marketing tools, real-time finance, sports scores, jokes, and NSFW ('not safe for work'; i.e. nudity, explicit material, graphic violence, or profanity) content performs well in web search but receives little or no Discover traffic.

The headline formula: authority, numbers, emotion, controversy

Increase your headline clickthrough in Discover with this trusty formula: authority figure + specific numerical detail + emotional stake + controversy/exclusive

For example: “Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy Sentenced to 3 Years: Supporters Outraged by ‘Unprecedented’ Prison Term”

  • Authority figure: Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy
  • Specific numerical detail: Sentenced to 3 Years
  • Emotional stake: Supporters Outraged
  • Controversy/exclusive: ‘Unprecedented’ Prison Term

Fair warning, don't mislead users: "The early parts of the content, above the fold, should really answer the user’s question as quickly and effectively as possible," Ray advises.

Optimal headline length:

  • 80–90 characters for web search
  • 90–105 characters for Discover
  • Over 130 characters is too long for either

Image optimisation: faces, emotion, and context

Consistent amongst the top performing articles in Discover are striking images that have three particular ingredients:

  • Human faces, authentic emotion or candid photography
  • Relationships/interactions, colour contrast or familiar figures
  • No sterile or branded imagery

Risks: NSFW, flags and buffering

There are some clear patterns that harm articles chances to appear in Discover:

  • NSFW or risky content not only fails to appear in Discover, but can drag down a site’s overall Discover visibility when mixing it with non-adult content. Consider a separate sub-domain or microsite for NSFW content.
  • Flags from Google from breaking advertising rules (typically content about adult topics or gambling). Articles that don't draw in visitors from either search or Discover should simply be removed them from Google’s index. This helps make sure Google only sees your best, most relevant content.
  • Unresolved technical problems build up on your website, like slow loading times or broken features. If these issues get serious, or if Google makes a major update to how it ranks content, you could suddenly lose a lot of visibility in Discover.

Future-proofing

With Discover’s volatility and the rise of imitators like Perplexity and ChatGPT Pulse, Ray stressed the importance of diversification:

  • Repurpose content across platforms and formats (social, video, podcasts, user-generated content)
  • Encourage journalists to build personal brands and social profiles, with Wired as an example of turning its journalists into influencers to grow subscriptions
  • AI search indexes multiple content types; YouTube and Reddit are heavily cited sources

"The more that your content is being echoed across many different platforms, the more likely you will be to show up in search as well as Discover," says Ray.

This article was drafted with the help of an AI assistant before it was edited by a human

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Written by

Jacob Granger
Jacob Granger
Jacob Granger is the community editor of JournalismUK

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