There is no publisher or content writer in the world which does not know about Google Discover. Here’s a quick history on it.
In the earlier avatar, it was called Google Feed. These were the AI curated lifestyle articles, weather updates and other important configurable cards which people saw on their (-1) screen on Android smartphones and on the homepage of the Google Chrome browser.
Google Feed was not intended to be an alternative to Google Search nor was it designed to drive traffic to publishers, the underlying idea was to help users discover the right content without them asking for it explicitly.
In 2018, it was rebranded from Google Feed to 'Google Discover', made major changes to the UI, created better user controls and also announced the future launch of Google Discover on the homepage.
Google Feed relies on automated systems to find a good match for the user’s interests. It was also designed to adapt to newly published content and the evolving interests of the user.
Read More: What is Google Discover? And What Publishers Need To Know
Ever since the rebranding and redesign, Google Discover has shown phenomenal growth, while the exact number of users interacting with Google Discover every month is unknown, we estimate it to be upwards of 1.5BN per month. The 2018 rebranding article claimed "more than 800 million people use the feed each month", since then it will be safe to assume that this would have doubled in the past 4 years. We also do not have stats on repeat usage but looking at available data, it will be safe to assume that every unique users interacts with Google Discover at least 4-5 times a month
Now this is massive. Google has (rather unintentionally) created an ecosystem which is now the largest traffic contributor to news and media publishers. Here are some interesting stats
Given the above scenario, you would think that publishers are investing time and energy to understand this channel, learn about the nuances of optimizing it and investing in ramping it up. Absolutely none of this is happening. In fact most publishers have not even bothered to open the dashboard to check the source of the traffic.
Publishers are making the same mistakes they did with Facebook traffic. Facebook in its heyday would contribute 30-35% PVs (pageviews), now the share has come down to low single digit. Publishers didn’t maximize the opportunity back then, nor do they truly understand the reason behind traffic dipping from Facebook.
Wake up! It is the right time to start optimizing for Google Discover.
We know that Google Discover content distribution works basis these 4 signals
We also know that publishers get ranked based on their authority for an entity. This is not different from ‘topical authority’ for SEO. For publishers it is important to
That brings us to question What are the Important metrics to track?
For now, publishers need to stop ignoring this very difficult beast and start investing their time on educating the internal teams to optimize for Google Discover. Just like there’s a team of SEO, it’s time to build one for Google Discover optimisation.
Also Read: How To Optimize For Google Discover? Know These 7 Simple Ways
Editor's Note: This article was co-authored by Neel Kothari, Sahil Sharma, and Tarek Abougabal.
Sahil Sharma is the Product Head at News18 Media & Investments Limited. He has over 10 years of product management experience spanning across product growth, product adoption, product engagement, and product retention.
Tarek Abougabal Heads sales for the MENA region at iZooto and is the co-founder of wtskora.