Can Blogs Get Into Google News?

Friday, July 16, 2021

At Google, we want to help everyone understand the world by connecting people with relevant and authoritative news from a variety of trusted publishers. Today, we're answering some common questions we've heard from publishers to help them better understand how news appears on Google News and Google Search.

Where does news appear on Google?

News content can appear on several different Google products, including Google News, Google Search, Google Assistant, YouTube, and Discover. For the purposes of this post, we'll focus on Google News and the News surfaces within Google Search, since most publisher questions pertain to these products.

Google News (which comprises the Google News iOS and Android apps, as well as news.google.com) includes a diverse set of features that help people find links to the latest news, along with the ability to follow specific topics and news sources. For example, the "For you" feed contains news stories based on your interests, while the Headlines section within the app surfaces fresh, newsworthy stories for all users in a particular region. People can also search within Google News to find links to content.

Google Search can show links to news content in web results, but Search also contains two news-specific surfaces. The Top stories carousel often appears at the top of Search results to highlight relevant news stories when people search for information on a timely topic like a recent sports game or the latest scientific breakthrough. Navigating to the News tab in Search helps people narrow their search results to focus on news-related results, which can help provide broader context for something in the news.

Is my site eligible to appear in these places?

Your site is automatically considered for Google News and news surfaces in Search — no application required. You just need to produce relevant content that's identified as:

Having high levels of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
Having a consistent history of producing original news-related content.
Complying with our News policies.

While we previously had an application process to appear in these news products, this process was retired nearly two years ago when we launched Publisher Center in December 2019. This change allowed us to identify more eligible news content across the entire web, including from sites perhaps overlooked in the past, because they didn't know they needed to apply.

The eligibility details here only apply to Google News, Top stories, and the News tab in Search. These details don't apply or impact the ability to appear in web results in Google Search. Learn more about how to Get your website on Google.

How do I know if my site is appearing?

It's best to look at the performance reports on Search Console for Google News and Google Search (filtered to the News search type) in Search Console. These reports indicate if your site is receiving traffic from Google News and news surfaces within Google Search. If so, you know that your content is eligible and relevant to appear. For more information about how to track performance, learn how to Measure the impact of Google News.

Is there anything I can do to improve my visibility?

Your site is automatically considered for Google News and news surfaces in Search — no application required. Once our systems identify content that is eligible to appear, its ranking is determined automatically by a variety of factors, including relevance of content, prominence, authoritativeness, freshness, location, and language.

You can use the Publisher Center to define certain details about your site — RSS feeds, website URLs, videos and more — that can help manage your brand and make it easier for Google to index your site. The Publisher Center can also be used to create a "News source" page for publications, if you don't already have one. This page allows Google News users – if they choose – to follow the publication and see its latest content.

While the Publisher Center can help you manage content that's deemed eligible, eligibility itself is determined through the automated process. Given this, being approved to use the Publisher Center, submitting content through it or having a News source page does not mean content will appear in:

Search results at Google News
Google News features like "For you" or Headlines
News surfaces in Search such as Top stories or the News tab

If you don't want your content to appear in Google News, you can block access to it without affecting your continued indexing and ranking in Google Search.

I'm following all your advice. Why am I still not appearing?

Make sure you're regularly producing original news content and are high in expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (our blog post about core updates has useful advice on this). Our systems run regularly and will automatically detect if a site has risen to better meet the criteria.

No system is perfect, and we're always looking at ways to improve our automated system. But since retiring our application process nearly two years ago, the current automated system has enabled thousands of new publishers — from national brands to emerging local publications — to receive visitors from Google News and news surfaces in Search.

We also encourage anyone to visit our How news works on Google site for more information.