Tim Konrad:
I would say that Google Discover, it's akin to ski touring, which is where you climb up the mountain without the assistance of lifts or helicopters or snowcats. And it's a slog, and it takes a lot of time and persistence and hard work. And then, all of a sudden, you're back down at the bottom of the hill in the blink of an eye and you have to put your skis back on and climb that hill again.
Stephanie Woodin:
We've been getting a lot of questions about Google Discover. Some creators are getting a lot of traffic there but finding it impossible to predict, and others aren't getting surface there at all. As traditional search traffic declines, figuring out the Google Discover game is crucial to creators, like Tim Konrad of Unofficial Networks. He joins us to make sense of his Google Discover traffic. Raptive's EVP of audience growth, Tom Crichlow, returns to the pod to answer Tim's question and share the latest research that will help you optimize for Google Discover.
Hi, Tom. Welcome back to Ctrl Alt Ask.
Tom Crichlow:
Hi. Thanks, Stephanie. Excited to be back.
Stephanie Woodin:
I'm so happy. You're our first repeat guest, which is really exciting. So because today is all about Google Discover, Tom, I thought we would let Google lead our icebreaker and get to know you a little more deeply. So I'm going to put you on the spot. If you could pull out your phone, look at Google Discover and tell me the first item that pops up.
Tom Crichlow:
You can probably tell a lot about me from scrolling through my Discover feed. The top item in my Discover feed right now is a post from Google that they launched their personal intelligence feature inside AI search. So that's a top thing on my Discover feed right now.
Stephanie Woodin:
Well, that just shows our audience that you are in it. Personal, professional time, Tom never takes a day off. He is always looking into what Google's up to.
Tom Crichlow:
That's true.
Stephanie Woodin:
I looked this morning and it was about the winter storm that is about to hit. I know you guys in New York, but us in the Southeast, and so hopefully by the time this airs, that will be a distant memory.
Tom Crichlow:
Yep.
Stephanie Woodin:
Stay warm.
Tom Crichlow:
Good luck, everyone.
Stephanie Woodin:
Yes. So speaking of winter weather, it's a perfect segue to our creator because Tim Konrad of Unofficial Networks has submitted a question all about Google Discover, and his site covers winter sports. So it couldn't be more appropriate to the time of year and what we're talking about. So let's dive in, see what Tim has to say.
Tim Konrad:
Hi, my name's Tim Konrad. I'm the founder of Unofficial Networks. We're an outdoor enthusiast publication with a focus on skiing and snowboarding. I started the business in 2005, and now we reach millions of people a month who are looking for news and information around outdoor activities, skiing, snowboarding, hiking, national parks, anything outdoors.
Probably in late 2018, we started seeing traffic coming in on our Google Analytics report. And at the time it was coming in, I believe they were calling it Android WordPress App. And we go, "What is that? Never heard of it," and it was a few months before we connected the dots and realized that the traffic was coming from Google Discover.
And initially we would see some pretty good traffic, and then there have been other periods of time where it gets very anemic and thin. It's a rollercoaster ride, and we don't always know how strong the traffic's going to be. And you're constantly guessing and trying to read the tea leaves, and you're trying to figure out what it is they're looking for.
Over the years, we've tried different approaches to what might perform well. There was a period in time where national park content was doing extremely well for us, and we really leaned into that. Then that tapered off. Currently what we're seeing is it really seems like location-based content. Additionally, lists, listicle format seems to be flavor of the month, but we never know what's around the corner.
So starting in Q4 of 2025, we saw a drop in traffic coming from Google Discover. And what we're linking it to, or what we believe is happening, is that there is more YouTube and X posts in the Google Discover feed, which is drowning out or diluting the blog content. Are you seeing that, and is there anything we can do to combat that?
Stephanie Woodin:
Tim, lots of good questions there. And his background motif really got me in the winter spirit. So a lot to get into, Tom, but I thought we could start with getting our audience a little bit grounded in what Google Discover even is. So maybe let's start there. What is Google Discover and when did it really come on the scene?
Tom Crichlow:
Yeah, great question. And Google Discover is an interesting one because the term Google Discover is an industry term. Nothing actually on the feed says Google Discover. So as a regular consumer or a user, you have no idea what the term Google Discover means.
So Google Discover is a recommended feed of personalized content that comes from Google, and it lives in a variety of places. So it lives inside Chrome. It lives inside the Google search app, on iOS if you're an iPhone user, but it's most commonly used and has the most reach on Android. So on an Android device, when you swipe left from the home screen, you have this feed of content right there. And again, it doesn't say Discover on it. It's just a feed of articles that shows up. And it's been around for a number of years, but has been growing steadily in usage and popularity, and it's actually huge. So Google Discover Global sends twice as many clicks as Google search.
Stephanie Woodin:
Twice? That's insane.
Tom Crichlow:
So for publishing news media sites, Google Discover is twice as big as search globally, and that's partly driven by the large Android usage outside the US.
Stephanie Woodin:
Okay.
Tom Crichlow:
Now in the US where iPhone has much more usage relative to Android, it's about neck and neck. So for media publishing news sites, Discover sends about the same amount of traffic as search does. So that's a ton of traffic.
Stephanie Woodin:
That's a ton. And for me, I'm an iPhone user, this is not an ad, but I had to go into my Google app, and that's where my feed lives. I don't know how many people actually use their Google app or if they just use a browser. It's an interesting discovery of the Discover feed in itself, especially if you're an iPhone user. So that's really interesting how much it's driving. But if you think on an international level, that makes total sense. And you're right, when I saw it, I didn't even know if that's what I was looking at. But Tim said he was noticing traffic from 2018, which I thought was really interesting. So it's been around since basically then?
Tom Crichlow:
It's been around for a long time. And I think Google's like, it seems from the outside Google's put a lot more investment into Google Discover in the last 12, 18 months, a lot more features and bells and whistles and whatnot. They've made more public announcements about it and so on. So I think it's become a much bigger thing in the last couple years. But again, if you're an Android user, it's very natively integrated into the OS, and so it gets a ton of usage.
Stephanie Woodin:
Okay. Well, that makes sense. Google is Android. So when either Discover first started or even when it started to pick up the past couple of years, I'd be curious what kinds of content were really getting pushed through Discover and has that shifted at all?
Tom Crichlow:
So fundamentally it is personalized to your browsing history and what Google knows about you, which is this interesting paradox because I think that everyone's default assumption is that Google knows everything about you. They have my Gmail. They have my Google Drive. They have my web search history. They have my browsing history. What does Google not know about me? And yet for all of the stereotypes and the digs that we take at Google, they're actually very, very privacy conscious and they're very, very reluctant to do anything that feels really creepy and weird like, "Oh my God, you know too much about me."
And so although the Discover feed is personalized to you, it's really personalized around a couple of core things which are entities. So this is topics that they think you're interested in or they know that you've looked at recently, and location-based things. And those are the two big things that they use to drive recommendations in your Discover feed.
So like Tim was mentioning, a lot of weather things appear related to where you are. And then also topically, if Google knows that you're into skiing, they might show you skiing content. The Discover feed is designed to be real-time content. And so that means that it heavily biases towards things that are newsy, timely, happening right now. In our data, we see that the typical lifespan of a Discover piece is three days. So something's published, it hits up in the Discover feed and then immediately dropped off. There's no evergreen or longer term things in there.
What that means for publishers is that, depending on what vertical you're in, you either get more or less Discover traffic. So for example, verticals like tech, gaming, news, travel, a lot of those types of sites can get more traffic from Discover than they get from search.
Stephanie Woodin:
Got it.
Tom Crichlow:
Whereas, for example, the food publishers, like recipe publishers, far less timely. They're publishing fresh recipe content, but it isn't-
Stephanie Woodin:
It's more evergreen, I guess, you could call it.
Tom Crichlow:
Exactly. And so for recipe sites, they get about 2% of their Google traffic from Discover and 98% from search, right?
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow, yeah.
Tom Crichlow:
And so it's radically different. For Tim's site, for example, they get over 90% of their traffic from Google Discover relative to search.
Stephanie Woodin:
90%.
Tom Crichlow:
And again, I think partly because they're publishing a lot of timely content about things that are happening with ski slopes opening or closing or weather events, things that are happening right now. And so a lot of publishers have become very reliant on this traffic because it is such a fire hose of clicks. It sends so many clicks to these publisher sites that it becomes a thing that is really keeping them alive.
Stephanie Woodin:
But it's very fickle is what it sounds like. So yes, you can rely on it as a source of traffic, but from what Tim was saying, it sounds like you don't always know when that could happen or it's like boom and bust a little bit.
Tom Crichlow:
Absolutely. And just to bring that to life a little bit, so in the Raptive network, for example, we have 6,000 sites across a variety of verticals and industries, niches, size, types, and so on. We saw some sites with the August update that happened in August 2025 that went from 10 million visits a month on Google Discover to less than one million visits a month, just almost like overnight with that algorithm update. So Google Discover is incredibly volatile. Like Tim said, it's like a black box. You don't really know what's happening with it.
Now, despite that kind of volatility on a site by site basis, Google Discover has actually been growing nicely in traffic overall. And so Chartbeat released some data looking at 800 US media sites. And they showed that Google search traffic, which I think everyone at this point has well understood, has been declining, right?
Stephanie Woodin:
Sure.
Tom Crichlow:
So search traffic is down 35% year over year at the end of 2025. But Google Discover, which had been growing and stable and healthy, is also down 28% at the end of 2025. So the first half of 2025, you saw these headlines like search is declining, but Discover's doing great. And then in the second half of 2025, everyone was like, search is declining and now Discover is declining too. And so back to that point, volatility, it's very unpredictable, and I think everyone assumes that it's only going to become more unpredictable and more volatile with what's happening next.
Stephanie Woodin:
So Tim was mentioning the idea that YouTube and X content could have been a reason why his content isn't getting as discovered on the feeds anymore. And I had personally noticed on my feed a lot more X posts coming through, and I thought that was really interesting. Can you talk a little bit about seeing more of that and is that really a factor to this traffic drop from Discover?
Tom Crichlow:
Yeah, there's really two big things that have happened in Q4 of 2025 that changed the Discover feed. YouTube has been present in Discover for a long time, and it's been growing, just like it is on search, but two things happen in Q4, which is X started gaining popularity. And so X links started appearing in Google Discover feed. According to data from NewzDash, which is a third-party Google Discover tracking platform, NewzDash showed that X was the fourth most popular domain on Google Discover after YouTube, Yahoo, and CNN, right?
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow.
Tom Crichlow:
So it's of the four top domains on Google Discover. You've got YouTube and X, which aren't pointing to websites. And then, obviously, Yahoo and CNN are big players. And so X is showing up a ton across Google Discover, which obviously reduces the room for other sites to appear.
Now the interesting thing is that when X links do appear on Google Discover, they can actually have links inside them. So just because it's an X post, you can still click it and actually end up going to the link, not to X, but to the end destination. So it's not terrible for clicks, I guess, but it's certainly showing up a lot and crowding out other things.
The second thing that happened in Q4 2025 was Google started testing AI summaries inside Google Discover. So this is the equivalent of AI overviews in search now showing up inside Google Discover. And according to some data from Marfeel, which again is a third-party data platform, AI summaries were showing 51% of the feed inside Google Discover.
Stephanie Woodin:
Whoa.
Tom Crichlow:
Now again, it's a little bit nuanced because those AI summaries can still have links in them. So I think it's a little bit like AI overviews in search. They probably suppress the click-through rate a little bit, but they don't completely remove the traffic. And so both of those things happened within testing and then rollout and so on in Q4.
So certainly I think that has had an impact on a lot of publishers' presence and distribution on Google Discover. But like for Raptive network, we saw the second half of 2025 better than the first half of 2025 and actually plus 5% year over year, and so I think that hasn't fully taken traffic away from publishers. And I think it speaks back to Tim's concern around what has happened to my traffic? It's very difficult for any individual publisher to understand what's going on across the board rather than what's just affecting their individual site.
Stephanie Woodin:
It sounds like there's no one answer, and that I'm sure can be very frustrating to creators trying to optimize content knowing that it could be a great traffic source, you just don't know exactly when you're going to hit. So let's get into some of that of how creators can actually work within Google Discover better. So what sites are really seeing Google Discover traffic right now? You said news and verticals that really aren't evergreen. Is that pretty much what creators should be thinking about when they're thinking about what Discover's going to prioritize?
Tom Crichlow:
Yeah. Like I said, Google Discover is all about timely content. So for any publisher that's publishing anything that's timely, high volume, et cetera, they have a chance to show up in Google Discover. Google Discover is harder to get into though than Google search.
So Google search has a proper long tail. Any website, in theory, is eligible to show up in Google search and Google search can show your site some percentage of the time for some percentage of queries that are relevant, specific, et cetera.
Google Discover, on the other hand, has a bit more gatekeeping around it. And so what we see in our data is that domain authority, which is a metric of how authoritative a website is, very strongly correlates with your search performance. So the more domain authority you have, the more search clicks you get. The lower your authority, the less search clicks you have.
The same is true for Discover. The more authority you have, the more you show up in Google Discover, but there's a flaw. So once you stop, get underneath a certain domain authority, you just don't show up in Google Discover at all.
We see that same correlation with branded search volume. So people that type into Google your site's name, so in Tim's case, Unofficial Networks, people typing Unofficial Networks or people typing Tim's name into Google, both of those things will contribute to Google's understanding of this is a real site with a real audience, with real demand. And they use those signals, again, to gatekeep who can be in the feed and who can't be in the feed.
So that's the first thing to say. And I think that's very frustrating for a lot of creators and publishers who feel like they're publishing high-quality content and they maybe have traffic from other sources, but they're not just showing up in Discover at all. And again, it's an authority question and a reputation question that is gatekeeping that gets you in there in the first place.
Stephanie Woodin:
Got it. So focusing on Tim again, what are some things he can tactically do to optimize his content for Google Discover right now?
Tom Crichlow:
I mean, to back up for a second, I think there's really three things that you can do to optimize for Google Discover, assuming that you're getting some presence there, you've got some inclusion in the feed. There's really three things, right?
Stephanie Woodin:
Okay.
Tom Crichlow:
So one is site-wide credibility. So like I mentioned, this is the stuff that is not easy to fix, hard, slow, long work of building your authority, building your reputation, getting high-quality backlinks, making sure that people are searching your brand name in Google, that just actual authority and reputation.
Stephanie Woodin:
Sure.
Tom Crichlow:
That matters, right?
Stephanie Woodin:
The second thing that you can do is make sure that your site is set up technically correct, so making sure that your feeds are structured in the right way, making sure that you have the right meta tags. We also see that Core Web Vitals plays a very strong role in Google Discover. We have some case studies of sites that had some Discover traffic, a little trickle, fixed their Core Web Vitals issues, and then Google Discover just jumps the next month. And so-
So talk about that really quick. What are Web Vitals?
Tom Crichlow:
Sorry. Core Web Vitals is a metric that Google measures, and there's a number of these vital metrics, as a measure of site speed. So it's essentially how performant and responsive your site is.
Stephanie Woodin:
Got it.
Tom Crichlow:
So if you have a slow website or if you have some technical problems with your images are too big or you're rendering things in the wrong order, et cetera, and that can be quite gnarly to debug. You usually need a development team or your hosting platform to get involved, but that stuff is important. And we've always known it's important in search, but I think the correlations are less hard to tease out in aggregate. Whereas again in Discover, I worked with a site last year, and we fixed their Core Web Vitals and then went from nothing to one and a half million clicks a month from Google Discover-
Stephanie Woodin:
What?
Tom Crichlow:
...with that Core Web Vitals.
Stephanie Woodin:
Just for clicking some slow performance issues?
Tom Crichlow:
Yep.
Stephanie Woodin:
Does that count more for mobile? I imagine how your site is showing up on mobile probably factors into that more so with Discover because of how people are using it.
Tom Crichlow:
Yes. Google Discover is, I'd say, 99% mobile traffic, and Google is very mobile-first, so all of their metrics they're measuring are definitely on mobile. And so that's the foundations, like I said, the authority metrics that you can care about, the technical metrics that you can care about.
And then there's the engagement, ongoing engagement in publishing that is the meat of, I'd say, how to "optimize" for Google Discover. And typically it's been a little bit of a black box, and you don't blame Tim. It's really difficult to see what's working, why it's working, all of this stuff. But fundamentally, I think optimizing for things like click-through rate, so the image and the title that shows up in Google Discover is the thing that drives whether somebody will choose to click on it or whether they will not choose to click on it.
And whether somebody chooses to click on it or not is how Google determines whether it should get shown to more people or whether it shouldn't. And so click-through rate is a function of just given a raw number of impressions, a higher click-through rate will get you more clicks, obviously. But if you get a higher click-through rate, it will also lead to more impressions. You'll get this snowballing effect, and no pun intended for Unofficial Networks, where the higher click-through rate is the more you'll get seen by more people. And so that's a function of really trying to really dial in that image and headline combo to make sure that it is compelling, enticing, interesting, the image has a high resolution, et cetera, et cetera.
So a lot of sites, I think, can suffer a little bit from using either stock imagery or from writing more boring titles. And there's a whole continuum and creative exploration there of what does that mean for your space? And obviously, there is a Google's published guidelines, they don't like there to be too much clickbait there. So, "Seven things about the winter storm you didn't know. Five will blow your mind." That cliched, we're not going to tell you anything, but we're going to try and get you to click. Google doesn't like that at all. At the same time, they often end up rewarding some of that stuff, right? But-
Stephanie Woodin:
Well, Tim said listicles, right?
Tom Crichlow:
Exactly, exactly.
Stephanie Woodin:
He said listicles do well, and it just took me back to the days of BuzzFeed listicles. I am a pure millennial here, but it is clickable, but maybe you're saying there's a happy medium, functional descriptive headline, but it's not, as you said, trying to be click-baity. Would that be a fair assessment?
Tom Crichlow:
A hundred percent, and you actually have a fair amount of room. The title tag length in Google Discover is longer than in regular search, and so you actually have a fair amount of room to be more verbose, more creative, et cetera.
So for example, for some of the food creators that we work with in our network, we've been recommending that the title they write for Google Discover is longer than the regular title they write for search. So for example, if you're writing a recipe about baked chicken thighs, for search you want to say, "Baked chicken thighs," or, "Delicious baked chicken thighs," something fairly straightforward. But for Google Discover, you probably want, "These baked chicken thighs will keep the whole family fed this winter," or something like much more enticing, verbose, appealing, et cetera, et cetera.
And then obviously the image plays a huge role in that. The image is the first thing you see above the title in Google Discover. And so again, optimizing that, making sure it's high quality and so on is really important.
And so that kind of raw engagement metric is a thing that you can optimize around and play around with. You can tweak. For example, for Unofficial Networks, for Tim's site, they post a lot about ski slope openings or weather-related things that impact ski slopes and so on. Those are quite formulaic, I think. And so you could create four or five different templates for each of those types of content, and you could try and cycle through them, see which ones work best, see which ones are getting the highest click-through rate in your Discover data, and then use that as a feedback loop for optimizing.
The other thing that you can do is looking at the day of the week. And so a lot of publishers, I think, have a fairly smooth publishing cadence or a publishing cadence that anchors to Monday through Friday because that's when their team works. But actually people use Discover when they're interested in content. And so there's often a bit of a mismatch there. And I actually looked at the Unofficial Networks data, and I saw that Tim's site publishes 57% of their content Monday through Wednesday, but Thursday through Sunday posts get 33% more clicks from viewers than from Monday through Wednesday.
Stephanie Woodin:
Which makes sense because people are skiing at the latter half of the week because they have off.
Tom Crichlow:
And that, like I said, the half life, that window of time between publishing and showing up in Google Discover is very short. So you publish it, it'll show up in Google Discover within 12 hours and then have that peak within 24, 36 hours. So you want to publish it when the demand is to really capture that Google Discover.
Stephanie Woodin:
That is fascinating. I feel like you could just hire an intern to just be your Discover watch person. Just like, "Have we hit yet? Have we hit?" I could imagine that could be a little addicting to figure out what's working and what's not and when you show up. And like you said, it sounds like a very small window.
Tom Crichlow:
Last thing to say about that, just philosophically, I think for a lot of sites is you've also got to figure out what is it about the topics that you write about that are getting talked about elsewhere, what is trending right now? And again, Google anchors to a lot of what they call entities, which are really things like people, places, events, locations, these things that are entities. And when Google sees that something is trending, they will then include content from those trending topics in Discover.
And so for example, this is a slightly made up example, but I think based in real fact, imagine that Keanu Reeves has a new movie coming out. So Google sees that Keanu Reeves has this spike in demand. If you wrote a post which is evergreen, not actually timely, but is like, "Here's some photos from Keanu Reeves' home. We did a home tour last year," from an interior design site, Google's going to show that at the moment when Keanu Reeves is spiking and trending.
So you want to try and publish stuff that is core to what you care about. There's no point posting a movie review as an interior design site, but you can post something about Keanu Reeves at the moment when Keanu Reeves is trending. So there's that kind of thinking of how do you take a view of the world of what is going on and what is relevant right now, and then how do you write something that's true to your authority and expertise and that can overlap with topics that Google is then going to pick up.
Stephanie Woodin:
That makes total sense because of timeliness and also I think relevance, not just for maybe even Google Discover, but in general for engagement on your site. Your readers know that you're culturally on the pulse. And we talk a lot about that in PR and communications. When you're pitching a creator for a news story or a feature lifestyle story, it has to feel relevant to the audience of that publication. It can't feel like it's out of left field. So that principle applies here, which is just fascinating to me that I think creators are constantly thinking about how they brand themselves to fit into the ecosystem, and this is the same kind of framework.
I'm curious, last episode we talked to Jamie at Black Girl Nerds about search and optimizing, and Eddie talked about opinion-based posts. Does that help with Discover traffic, content that has more of a POV and more of an opinion?
Tom Crichlow:
Yeah. I think actually, if I can be a little philosophical for a second, the rise of Reddit in search, which we've seen over the last 18 months, two years, has been because Google had this fundamental realization that people want first-person opinion, right?
Stephanie Woodin:
Yep.
Tom Crichlow:
They don't always want the glossy, generic, a whole team of editors and writers has worked on this to produce something that has mass appeal. People want Joe from down the street says X, Y, and Z. And I think that's a large part of why Reddit or one reason why Reddit has dominated on search results.
I think that's the same reason why X is showing up on Google Discover. And Google's realizing they don't just want the... So back to the very first example I gave in my Discover feed around Gemini launching this personalized intelligence feature. There's two things that Google could show in my Discover feed. They could show the official blog post from Google that says, "Personalized intelligence is launching. Read all about it." Or they could feature an X post from somebody being like, "OMG, can't believe personalized intelligence is going to change the way that Gemini works." And I think that Google fundamentally believes, probably correctly, that the second is what people really want.
And so I think perspective first-person point of view is absolutely stuff that works. Again, depending on your niche, certain publishers have seen that faces in the Google Discover tile can work very well. So again, people want to read something that they believe has some kind of human connection in it.
Stephanie Woodin:
Sure.
Tom Crichlow:
I think that will only get even more important with all of the AI slop that we're seeing. A generic title with a stock image or a generic flat image, people are going to be like, "What is this, and how do I know that it's not just going to be a waste of my time?"
Stephanie Woodin:
Exactly. Human connection obviously still wins the day, even though we're being served a lot of this AI overview and all of these changes with the algorithm, but I think it's a good takeaway for creators to remember.
So wrapping up, I'd love to look at the future. We've talked a lot about what's affected creators and Tim, but where do you see the algorithm with Discover going next? What is your forecast, where you think this will go in the next year, two years? I know it's hard to predict.
Tom Crichlow:
I'm not going to predict two years just because... I'm going to stop you right there. I don't think anyone can predict anything about the world two years from now.
Stephanie Woodin:
Let's say six months to 12 months.
Tom Crichlow:
Let's say 90 days.
Stephanie Woodin:
Exactly.
Tom Crichlow:
So I think two things are true. So I fundamentally believe that the Google Discover feed is going to radically change in the next year. I think that we're really going to see, Google's going to lean into this personalization. They're going to lean into Gemini. AI is going to radically reshape their Discover feed in all kinds of ways.
Who knows what that means? There's a optimistic side of me that's like, that could be a real boon for the web. The fact that it can actually really understand what you're interested in and then serve you articles that you really want to read and really want to spend time with, that could be great for people publishing niche, focused, stuff that their community really enjoys, stuff they have unique expertise around. That could be great for the web.
On the other hand, they could use AI to do all kinds of bad things, like AI now just writes you a feed of content that it thinks you're interested in, but it just made it up or it is summarizing stuff and doesn't link out and doesn't drive clicks back to the web. So there's ways I could also imagine that Google could mess things up and do things that are bad for the ecosystem.
And then obviously I think we'll continue to get things like X and probably Threads posts will start showing up in Google Discover at some point this year. I just saw that Threads is now bigger than an X according to the Similarweb.
Stephanie Woodin:
Nice.
Tom Crichlow:
And so I think things like that will continue to happen, really radically reshape how it all works. But I said two things are true. While all of that macro stuff is happening, I also think most publishers, almost every publisher that I've worked with has some low-hanging fruit with Google Discover. There's plenty of stuff to do to optimize for Google Discover that publishers are just not aware of, not thinking about, not focusing on. But there's things that you can do within your control that will increase your Discover reach and performance.
So here at Raptive, my team in 2025, we did a lot of work with Google Discover with publishers and creators in our network. We had some great results. We saw a site that wasn't writing these longer titles, started writing longer titles, got 150,000 extra visits a month from Google Discover.
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow.
Tom Crichlow:
We worked with a recipe site that wasn't publishing recipe roundups to start adding these recipe roundups as well as their recipes. And they found that recipe roundups got nine times as much traffic from Discover that their recipes did. We worked with a site to fix a meta tag, a single meta tag. They were already getting a fair amount of Discover traffic, and they got 400% more discover traffic just for fixing that meta tag.
Stephanie Woodin:
Just for fixing a meta tag.
Tom Crichlow:
So there's stuff like that. Again, I think any individual publisher, yes, Google Discover is a black box. It's hard to optimize for.
Stephanie Woodin:
Sure.
Tom Crichlow:
At the same time, there is a fair amount of things that you can do within your control. And the last thing, just give a plug for my team at Raptive.
Stephanie Woodin:
Plug away.
Tom Crichlow:
We're actually working on a Google Discover workbook that will show you all your Discover data inside the Raptive dashboard. So you can see some of the things I talked about about branded search volume and how [inaudible 00:30:46] of your site is doing. Your Core Web Vitals, so if there's any issues there. As well as some of these basics, like what works best for day of week, performance by author, some of these things that you can't get out of Google Search Console.
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow.
Tom Crichlow:
So I'm really excited. We're building it right now. We're going to be piloting that with creators and publishers probably towards the end of Q1, hopefully trying to get a little bit to that need state that Tim mentioned of not really knowing what to do and not really having any good data. We're hopefully going to help out a little bit.
Stephanie Woodin:
That's huge. And I guess I should take back what I said about needing an intern. You just need to join the Raptive network-
Tom Crichlow:
Exactly.
Stephanie Woodin:
... and get Tom's playbook to know what's happening with Discover. Well, Tom, thank you so much for all of this. This was really fun, and I learned a lot about Discover, and now I'm going to look at it a lot differently when I go in there and see an X post. I'm going to make sure to click on that link and get someone those click-throughs because that's really important. But thank you. We loved having you back. You are a treasure trove of information, and stay warm.
Tom Crichlow:
I love the podcast. I love to be back. Let's make this a recurring thing.
Stephanie Woodin:
Always. Thanks, Tom.
Tom Crichlow:
Thanks.
Stephanie Woodin:
Have a good one. Thanks, Tim and Tom, for a great episode. If you're a creator with a burning question, email us at ctrlaltask@raptive.com and tell us your story. We would love to hear from you.
If you want to learn more about the Discover workbook that Tom mentioned, visit Raptive.com and inquire. And if you're a creator in our Raptive Network already, we'll be letting you know when it's going live.
For more information on everything we talked about today, you can visit the show notes or our website, raptive.com/ctrlaltask.
I would say that Google Discover, it's akin to ski touring, which is where you climb up the mountain without the assistance of lifts or helicopters or snowcats. And it's a slog, and it takes a lot of time and persistence and hard work. And then, all of a sudden, you're back down at the bottom of the hill in the blink of an eye and you have to put your skis back on and climb that hill again.
Stephanie Woodin:
We've been getting a lot of questions about Google Discover. Some creators are getting a lot of traffic there but finding it impossible to predict, and others aren't getting surface there at all. As traditional search traffic declines, figuring out the Google Discover game is crucial to creators, like Tim Konrad of Unofficial Networks. He joins us to make sense of his Google Discover traffic. Raptive's EVP of audience growth, Tom Crichlow, returns to the pod to answer Tim's question and share the latest research that will help you optimize for Google Discover.
Hi, Tom. Welcome back to Ctrl Alt Ask.
Tom Crichlow:
Hi. Thanks, Stephanie. Excited to be back.
Stephanie Woodin:
I'm so happy. You're our first repeat guest, which is really exciting. So because today is all about Google Discover, Tom, I thought we would let Google lead our icebreaker and get to know you a little more deeply. So I'm going to put you on the spot. If you could pull out your phone, look at Google Discover and tell me the first item that pops up.
Tom Crichlow:
You can probably tell a lot about me from scrolling through my Discover feed. The top item in my Discover feed right now is a post from Google that they launched their personal intelligence feature inside AI search. So that's a top thing on my Discover feed right now.
Stephanie Woodin:
Well, that just shows our audience that you are in it. Personal, professional time, Tom never takes a day off. He is always looking into what Google's up to.
Tom Crichlow:
That's true.
Stephanie Woodin:
I looked this morning and it was about the winter storm that is about to hit. I know you guys in New York, but us in the Southeast, and so hopefully by the time this airs, that will be a distant memory.
Tom Crichlow:
Yep.
Stephanie Woodin:
Stay warm.
Tom Crichlow:
Good luck, everyone.
Stephanie Woodin:
Yes. So speaking of winter weather, it's a perfect segue to our creator because Tim Konrad of Unofficial Networks has submitted a question all about Google Discover, and his site covers winter sports. So it couldn't be more appropriate to the time of year and what we're talking about. So let's dive in, see what Tim has to say.
Tim Konrad:
Hi, my name's Tim Konrad. I'm the founder of Unofficial Networks. We're an outdoor enthusiast publication with a focus on skiing and snowboarding. I started the business in 2005, and now we reach millions of people a month who are looking for news and information around outdoor activities, skiing, snowboarding, hiking, national parks, anything outdoors.
Probably in late 2018, we started seeing traffic coming in on our Google Analytics report. And at the time it was coming in, I believe they were calling it Android WordPress App. And we go, "What is that? Never heard of it," and it was a few months before we connected the dots and realized that the traffic was coming from Google Discover.
And initially we would see some pretty good traffic, and then there have been other periods of time where it gets very anemic and thin. It's a rollercoaster ride, and we don't always know how strong the traffic's going to be. And you're constantly guessing and trying to read the tea leaves, and you're trying to figure out what it is they're looking for.
Over the years, we've tried different approaches to what might perform well. There was a period in time where national park content was doing extremely well for us, and we really leaned into that. Then that tapered off. Currently what we're seeing is it really seems like location-based content. Additionally, lists, listicle format seems to be flavor of the month, but we never know what's around the corner.
So starting in Q4 of 2025, we saw a drop in traffic coming from Google Discover. And what we're linking it to, or what we believe is happening, is that there is more YouTube and X posts in the Google Discover feed, which is drowning out or diluting the blog content. Are you seeing that, and is there anything we can do to combat that?
Stephanie Woodin:
Tim, lots of good questions there. And his background motif really got me in the winter spirit. So a lot to get into, Tom, but I thought we could start with getting our audience a little bit grounded in what Google Discover even is. So maybe let's start there. What is Google Discover and when did it really come on the scene?
Tom Crichlow:
Yeah, great question. And Google Discover is an interesting one because the term Google Discover is an industry term. Nothing actually on the feed says Google Discover. So as a regular consumer or a user, you have no idea what the term Google Discover means.
So Google Discover is a recommended feed of personalized content that comes from Google, and it lives in a variety of places. So it lives inside Chrome. It lives inside the Google search app, on iOS if you're an iPhone user, but it's most commonly used and has the most reach on Android. So on an Android device, when you swipe left from the home screen, you have this feed of content right there. And again, it doesn't say Discover on it. It's just a feed of articles that shows up. And it's been around for a number of years, but has been growing steadily in usage and popularity, and it's actually huge. So Google Discover Global sends twice as many clicks as Google search.
Stephanie Woodin:
Twice? That's insane.
Tom Crichlow:
So for publishing news media sites, Google Discover is twice as big as search globally, and that's partly driven by the large Android usage outside the US.
Stephanie Woodin:
Okay.
Tom Crichlow:
Now in the US where iPhone has much more usage relative to Android, it's about neck and neck. So for media publishing news sites, Discover sends about the same amount of traffic as search does. So that's a ton of traffic.
Stephanie Woodin:
That's a ton. And for me, I'm an iPhone user, this is not an ad, but I had to go into my Google app, and that's where my feed lives. I don't know how many people actually use their Google app or if they just use a browser. It's an interesting discovery of the Discover feed in itself, especially if you're an iPhone user. So that's really interesting how much it's driving. But if you think on an international level, that makes total sense. And you're right, when I saw it, I didn't even know if that's what I was looking at. But Tim said he was noticing traffic from 2018, which I thought was really interesting. So it's been around since basically then?
Tom Crichlow:
It's been around for a long time. And I think Google's like, it seems from the outside Google's put a lot more investment into Google Discover in the last 12, 18 months, a lot more features and bells and whistles and whatnot. They've made more public announcements about it and so on. So I think it's become a much bigger thing in the last couple years. But again, if you're an Android user, it's very natively integrated into the OS, and so it gets a ton of usage.
Stephanie Woodin:
Okay. Well, that makes sense. Google is Android. So when either Discover first started or even when it started to pick up the past couple of years, I'd be curious what kinds of content were really getting pushed through Discover and has that shifted at all?
Tom Crichlow:
So fundamentally it is personalized to your browsing history and what Google knows about you, which is this interesting paradox because I think that everyone's default assumption is that Google knows everything about you. They have my Gmail. They have my Google Drive. They have my web search history. They have my browsing history. What does Google not know about me? And yet for all of the stereotypes and the digs that we take at Google, they're actually very, very privacy conscious and they're very, very reluctant to do anything that feels really creepy and weird like, "Oh my God, you know too much about me."
And so although the Discover feed is personalized to you, it's really personalized around a couple of core things which are entities. So this is topics that they think you're interested in or they know that you've looked at recently, and location-based things. And those are the two big things that they use to drive recommendations in your Discover feed.
So like Tim was mentioning, a lot of weather things appear related to where you are. And then also topically, if Google knows that you're into skiing, they might show you skiing content. The Discover feed is designed to be real-time content. And so that means that it heavily biases towards things that are newsy, timely, happening right now. In our data, we see that the typical lifespan of a Discover piece is three days. So something's published, it hits up in the Discover feed and then immediately dropped off. There's no evergreen or longer term things in there.
What that means for publishers is that, depending on what vertical you're in, you either get more or less Discover traffic. So for example, verticals like tech, gaming, news, travel, a lot of those types of sites can get more traffic from Discover than they get from search.
Stephanie Woodin:
Got it.
Tom Crichlow:
Whereas, for example, the food publishers, like recipe publishers, far less timely. They're publishing fresh recipe content, but it isn't-
Stephanie Woodin:
It's more evergreen, I guess, you could call it.
Tom Crichlow:
Exactly. And so for recipe sites, they get about 2% of their Google traffic from Discover and 98% from search, right?
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow, yeah.
Tom Crichlow:
And so it's radically different. For Tim's site, for example, they get over 90% of their traffic from Google Discover relative to search.
Stephanie Woodin:
90%.
Tom Crichlow:
And again, I think partly because they're publishing a lot of timely content about things that are happening with ski slopes opening or closing or weather events, things that are happening right now. And so a lot of publishers have become very reliant on this traffic because it is such a fire hose of clicks. It sends so many clicks to these publisher sites that it becomes a thing that is really keeping them alive.
Stephanie Woodin:
But it's very fickle is what it sounds like. So yes, you can rely on it as a source of traffic, but from what Tim was saying, it sounds like you don't always know when that could happen or it's like boom and bust a little bit.
Tom Crichlow:
Absolutely. And just to bring that to life a little bit, so in the Raptive network, for example, we have 6,000 sites across a variety of verticals and industries, niches, size, types, and so on. We saw some sites with the August update that happened in August 2025 that went from 10 million visits a month on Google Discover to less than one million visits a month, just almost like overnight with that algorithm update. So Google Discover is incredibly volatile. Like Tim said, it's like a black box. You don't really know what's happening with it.
Now, despite that kind of volatility on a site by site basis, Google Discover has actually been growing nicely in traffic overall. And so Chartbeat released some data looking at 800 US media sites. And they showed that Google search traffic, which I think everyone at this point has well understood, has been declining, right?
Stephanie Woodin:
Sure.
Tom Crichlow:
So search traffic is down 35% year over year at the end of 2025. But Google Discover, which had been growing and stable and healthy, is also down 28% at the end of 2025. So the first half of 2025, you saw these headlines like search is declining, but Discover's doing great. And then in the second half of 2025, everyone was like, search is declining and now Discover is declining too. And so back to that point, volatility, it's very unpredictable, and I think everyone assumes that it's only going to become more unpredictable and more volatile with what's happening next.
Stephanie Woodin:
So Tim was mentioning the idea that YouTube and X content could have been a reason why his content isn't getting as discovered on the feeds anymore. And I had personally noticed on my feed a lot more X posts coming through, and I thought that was really interesting. Can you talk a little bit about seeing more of that and is that really a factor to this traffic drop from Discover?
Tom Crichlow:
Yeah, there's really two big things that have happened in Q4 of 2025 that changed the Discover feed. YouTube has been present in Discover for a long time, and it's been growing, just like it is on search, but two things happen in Q4, which is X started gaining popularity. And so X links started appearing in Google Discover feed. According to data from NewzDash, which is a third-party Google Discover tracking platform, NewzDash showed that X was the fourth most popular domain on Google Discover after YouTube, Yahoo, and CNN, right?
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow.
Tom Crichlow:
So it's of the four top domains on Google Discover. You've got YouTube and X, which aren't pointing to websites. And then, obviously, Yahoo and CNN are big players. And so X is showing up a ton across Google Discover, which obviously reduces the room for other sites to appear.
Now the interesting thing is that when X links do appear on Google Discover, they can actually have links inside them. So just because it's an X post, you can still click it and actually end up going to the link, not to X, but to the end destination. So it's not terrible for clicks, I guess, but it's certainly showing up a lot and crowding out other things.
The second thing that happened in Q4 2025 was Google started testing AI summaries inside Google Discover. So this is the equivalent of AI overviews in search now showing up inside Google Discover. And according to some data from Marfeel, which again is a third-party data platform, AI summaries were showing 51% of the feed inside Google Discover.
Stephanie Woodin:
Whoa.
Tom Crichlow:
Now again, it's a little bit nuanced because those AI summaries can still have links in them. So I think it's a little bit like AI overviews in search. They probably suppress the click-through rate a little bit, but they don't completely remove the traffic. And so both of those things happened within testing and then rollout and so on in Q4.
So certainly I think that has had an impact on a lot of publishers' presence and distribution on Google Discover. But like for Raptive network, we saw the second half of 2025 better than the first half of 2025 and actually plus 5% year over year, and so I think that hasn't fully taken traffic away from publishers. And I think it speaks back to Tim's concern around what has happened to my traffic? It's very difficult for any individual publisher to understand what's going on across the board rather than what's just affecting their individual site.
Stephanie Woodin:
It sounds like there's no one answer, and that I'm sure can be very frustrating to creators trying to optimize content knowing that it could be a great traffic source, you just don't know exactly when you're going to hit. So let's get into some of that of how creators can actually work within Google Discover better. So what sites are really seeing Google Discover traffic right now? You said news and verticals that really aren't evergreen. Is that pretty much what creators should be thinking about when they're thinking about what Discover's going to prioritize?
Tom Crichlow:
Yeah. Like I said, Google Discover is all about timely content. So for any publisher that's publishing anything that's timely, high volume, et cetera, they have a chance to show up in Google Discover. Google Discover is harder to get into though than Google search.
So Google search has a proper long tail. Any website, in theory, is eligible to show up in Google search and Google search can show your site some percentage of the time for some percentage of queries that are relevant, specific, et cetera.
Google Discover, on the other hand, has a bit more gatekeeping around it. And so what we see in our data is that domain authority, which is a metric of how authoritative a website is, very strongly correlates with your search performance. So the more domain authority you have, the more search clicks you get. The lower your authority, the less search clicks you have.
The same is true for Discover. The more authority you have, the more you show up in Google Discover, but there's a flaw. So once you stop, get underneath a certain domain authority, you just don't show up in Google Discover at all.
We see that same correlation with branded search volume. So people that type into Google your site's name, so in Tim's case, Unofficial Networks, people typing Unofficial Networks or people typing Tim's name into Google, both of those things will contribute to Google's understanding of this is a real site with a real audience, with real demand. And they use those signals, again, to gatekeep who can be in the feed and who can't be in the feed.
So that's the first thing to say. And I think that's very frustrating for a lot of creators and publishers who feel like they're publishing high-quality content and they maybe have traffic from other sources, but they're not just showing up in Discover at all. And again, it's an authority question and a reputation question that is gatekeeping that gets you in there in the first place.
Stephanie Woodin:
Got it. So focusing on Tim again, what are some things he can tactically do to optimize his content for Google Discover right now?
Tom Crichlow:
I mean, to back up for a second, I think there's really three things that you can do to optimize for Google Discover, assuming that you're getting some presence there, you've got some inclusion in the feed. There's really three things, right?
Stephanie Woodin:
Okay.
Tom Crichlow:
So one is site-wide credibility. So like I mentioned, this is the stuff that is not easy to fix, hard, slow, long work of building your authority, building your reputation, getting high-quality backlinks, making sure that people are searching your brand name in Google, that just actual authority and reputation.
Stephanie Woodin:
Sure.
Tom Crichlow:
That matters, right?
Stephanie Woodin:
The second thing that you can do is make sure that your site is set up technically correct, so making sure that your feeds are structured in the right way, making sure that you have the right meta tags. We also see that Core Web Vitals plays a very strong role in Google Discover. We have some case studies of sites that had some Discover traffic, a little trickle, fixed their Core Web Vitals issues, and then Google Discover just jumps the next month. And so-
So talk about that really quick. What are Web Vitals?
Tom Crichlow:
Sorry. Core Web Vitals is a metric that Google measures, and there's a number of these vital metrics, as a measure of site speed. So it's essentially how performant and responsive your site is.
Stephanie Woodin:
Got it.
Tom Crichlow:
So if you have a slow website or if you have some technical problems with your images are too big or you're rendering things in the wrong order, et cetera, and that can be quite gnarly to debug. You usually need a development team or your hosting platform to get involved, but that stuff is important. And we've always known it's important in search, but I think the correlations are less hard to tease out in aggregate. Whereas again in Discover, I worked with a site last year, and we fixed their Core Web Vitals and then went from nothing to one and a half million clicks a month from Google Discover-
Stephanie Woodin:
What?
Tom Crichlow:
...with that Core Web Vitals.
Stephanie Woodin:
Just for clicking some slow performance issues?
Tom Crichlow:
Yep.
Stephanie Woodin:
Does that count more for mobile? I imagine how your site is showing up on mobile probably factors into that more so with Discover because of how people are using it.
Tom Crichlow:
Yes. Google Discover is, I'd say, 99% mobile traffic, and Google is very mobile-first, so all of their metrics they're measuring are definitely on mobile. And so that's the foundations, like I said, the authority metrics that you can care about, the technical metrics that you can care about.
And then there's the engagement, ongoing engagement in publishing that is the meat of, I'd say, how to "optimize" for Google Discover. And typically it's been a little bit of a black box, and you don't blame Tim. It's really difficult to see what's working, why it's working, all of this stuff. But fundamentally, I think optimizing for things like click-through rate, so the image and the title that shows up in Google Discover is the thing that drives whether somebody will choose to click on it or whether they will not choose to click on it.
And whether somebody chooses to click on it or not is how Google determines whether it should get shown to more people or whether it shouldn't. And so click-through rate is a function of just given a raw number of impressions, a higher click-through rate will get you more clicks, obviously. But if you get a higher click-through rate, it will also lead to more impressions. You'll get this snowballing effect, and no pun intended for Unofficial Networks, where the higher click-through rate is the more you'll get seen by more people. And so that's a function of really trying to really dial in that image and headline combo to make sure that it is compelling, enticing, interesting, the image has a high resolution, et cetera, et cetera.
So a lot of sites, I think, can suffer a little bit from using either stock imagery or from writing more boring titles. And there's a whole continuum and creative exploration there of what does that mean for your space? And obviously, there is a Google's published guidelines, they don't like there to be too much clickbait there. So, "Seven things about the winter storm you didn't know. Five will blow your mind." That cliched, we're not going to tell you anything, but we're going to try and get you to click. Google doesn't like that at all. At the same time, they often end up rewarding some of that stuff, right? But-
Stephanie Woodin:
Well, Tim said listicles, right?
Tom Crichlow:
Exactly, exactly.
Stephanie Woodin:
He said listicles do well, and it just took me back to the days of BuzzFeed listicles. I am a pure millennial here, but it is clickable, but maybe you're saying there's a happy medium, functional descriptive headline, but it's not, as you said, trying to be click-baity. Would that be a fair assessment?
Tom Crichlow:
A hundred percent, and you actually have a fair amount of room. The title tag length in Google Discover is longer than in regular search, and so you actually have a fair amount of room to be more verbose, more creative, et cetera.
So for example, for some of the food creators that we work with in our network, we've been recommending that the title they write for Google Discover is longer than the regular title they write for search. So for example, if you're writing a recipe about baked chicken thighs, for search you want to say, "Baked chicken thighs," or, "Delicious baked chicken thighs," something fairly straightforward. But for Google Discover, you probably want, "These baked chicken thighs will keep the whole family fed this winter," or something like much more enticing, verbose, appealing, et cetera, et cetera.
And then obviously the image plays a huge role in that. The image is the first thing you see above the title in Google Discover. And so again, optimizing that, making sure it's high quality and so on is really important.
And so that kind of raw engagement metric is a thing that you can optimize around and play around with. You can tweak. For example, for Unofficial Networks, for Tim's site, they post a lot about ski slope openings or weather-related things that impact ski slopes and so on. Those are quite formulaic, I think. And so you could create four or five different templates for each of those types of content, and you could try and cycle through them, see which ones work best, see which ones are getting the highest click-through rate in your Discover data, and then use that as a feedback loop for optimizing.
The other thing that you can do is looking at the day of the week. And so a lot of publishers, I think, have a fairly smooth publishing cadence or a publishing cadence that anchors to Monday through Friday because that's when their team works. But actually people use Discover when they're interested in content. And so there's often a bit of a mismatch there. And I actually looked at the Unofficial Networks data, and I saw that Tim's site publishes 57% of their content Monday through Wednesday, but Thursday through Sunday posts get 33% more clicks from viewers than from Monday through Wednesday.
Stephanie Woodin:
Which makes sense because people are skiing at the latter half of the week because they have off.
Tom Crichlow:
And that, like I said, the half life, that window of time between publishing and showing up in Google Discover is very short. So you publish it, it'll show up in Google Discover within 12 hours and then have that peak within 24, 36 hours. So you want to publish it when the demand is to really capture that Google Discover.
Stephanie Woodin:
That is fascinating. I feel like you could just hire an intern to just be your Discover watch person. Just like, "Have we hit yet? Have we hit?" I could imagine that could be a little addicting to figure out what's working and what's not and when you show up. And like you said, it sounds like a very small window.
Tom Crichlow:
Last thing to say about that, just philosophically, I think for a lot of sites is you've also got to figure out what is it about the topics that you write about that are getting talked about elsewhere, what is trending right now? And again, Google anchors to a lot of what they call entities, which are really things like people, places, events, locations, these things that are entities. And when Google sees that something is trending, they will then include content from those trending topics in Discover.
And so for example, this is a slightly made up example, but I think based in real fact, imagine that Keanu Reeves has a new movie coming out. So Google sees that Keanu Reeves has this spike in demand. If you wrote a post which is evergreen, not actually timely, but is like, "Here's some photos from Keanu Reeves' home. We did a home tour last year," from an interior design site, Google's going to show that at the moment when Keanu Reeves is spiking and trending.
So you want to try and publish stuff that is core to what you care about. There's no point posting a movie review as an interior design site, but you can post something about Keanu Reeves at the moment when Keanu Reeves is trending. So there's that kind of thinking of how do you take a view of the world of what is going on and what is relevant right now, and then how do you write something that's true to your authority and expertise and that can overlap with topics that Google is then going to pick up.
Stephanie Woodin:
That makes total sense because of timeliness and also I think relevance, not just for maybe even Google Discover, but in general for engagement on your site. Your readers know that you're culturally on the pulse. And we talk a lot about that in PR and communications. When you're pitching a creator for a news story or a feature lifestyle story, it has to feel relevant to the audience of that publication. It can't feel like it's out of left field. So that principle applies here, which is just fascinating to me that I think creators are constantly thinking about how they brand themselves to fit into the ecosystem, and this is the same kind of framework.
I'm curious, last episode we talked to Jamie at Black Girl Nerds about search and optimizing, and Eddie talked about opinion-based posts. Does that help with Discover traffic, content that has more of a POV and more of an opinion?
Tom Crichlow:
Yeah. I think actually, if I can be a little philosophical for a second, the rise of Reddit in search, which we've seen over the last 18 months, two years, has been because Google had this fundamental realization that people want first-person opinion, right?
Stephanie Woodin:
Yep.
Tom Crichlow:
They don't always want the glossy, generic, a whole team of editors and writers has worked on this to produce something that has mass appeal. People want Joe from down the street says X, Y, and Z. And I think that's a large part of why Reddit or one reason why Reddit has dominated on search results.
I think that's the same reason why X is showing up on Google Discover. And Google's realizing they don't just want the... So back to the very first example I gave in my Discover feed around Gemini launching this personalized intelligence feature. There's two things that Google could show in my Discover feed. They could show the official blog post from Google that says, "Personalized intelligence is launching. Read all about it." Or they could feature an X post from somebody being like, "OMG, can't believe personalized intelligence is going to change the way that Gemini works." And I think that Google fundamentally believes, probably correctly, that the second is what people really want.
And so I think perspective first-person point of view is absolutely stuff that works. Again, depending on your niche, certain publishers have seen that faces in the Google Discover tile can work very well. So again, people want to read something that they believe has some kind of human connection in it.
Stephanie Woodin:
Sure.
Tom Crichlow:
I think that will only get even more important with all of the AI slop that we're seeing. A generic title with a stock image or a generic flat image, people are going to be like, "What is this, and how do I know that it's not just going to be a waste of my time?"
Stephanie Woodin:
Exactly. Human connection obviously still wins the day, even though we're being served a lot of this AI overview and all of these changes with the algorithm, but I think it's a good takeaway for creators to remember.
So wrapping up, I'd love to look at the future. We've talked a lot about what's affected creators and Tim, but where do you see the algorithm with Discover going next? What is your forecast, where you think this will go in the next year, two years? I know it's hard to predict.
Tom Crichlow:
I'm not going to predict two years just because... I'm going to stop you right there. I don't think anyone can predict anything about the world two years from now.
Stephanie Woodin:
Let's say six months to 12 months.
Tom Crichlow:
Let's say 90 days.
Stephanie Woodin:
Exactly.
Tom Crichlow:
So I think two things are true. So I fundamentally believe that the Google Discover feed is going to radically change in the next year. I think that we're really going to see, Google's going to lean into this personalization. They're going to lean into Gemini. AI is going to radically reshape their Discover feed in all kinds of ways.
Who knows what that means? There's a optimistic side of me that's like, that could be a real boon for the web. The fact that it can actually really understand what you're interested in and then serve you articles that you really want to read and really want to spend time with, that could be great for people publishing niche, focused, stuff that their community really enjoys, stuff they have unique expertise around. That could be great for the web.
On the other hand, they could use AI to do all kinds of bad things, like AI now just writes you a feed of content that it thinks you're interested in, but it just made it up or it is summarizing stuff and doesn't link out and doesn't drive clicks back to the web. So there's ways I could also imagine that Google could mess things up and do things that are bad for the ecosystem.
And then obviously I think we'll continue to get things like X and probably Threads posts will start showing up in Google Discover at some point this year. I just saw that Threads is now bigger than an X according to the Similarweb.
Stephanie Woodin:
Nice.
Tom Crichlow:
And so I think things like that will continue to happen, really radically reshape how it all works. But I said two things are true. While all of that macro stuff is happening, I also think most publishers, almost every publisher that I've worked with has some low-hanging fruit with Google Discover. There's plenty of stuff to do to optimize for Google Discover that publishers are just not aware of, not thinking about, not focusing on. But there's things that you can do within your control that will increase your Discover reach and performance.
So here at Raptive, my team in 2025, we did a lot of work with Google Discover with publishers and creators in our network. We had some great results. We saw a site that wasn't writing these longer titles, started writing longer titles, got 150,000 extra visits a month from Google Discover.
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow.
Tom Crichlow:
We worked with a recipe site that wasn't publishing recipe roundups to start adding these recipe roundups as well as their recipes. And they found that recipe roundups got nine times as much traffic from Discover that their recipes did. We worked with a site to fix a meta tag, a single meta tag. They were already getting a fair amount of Discover traffic, and they got 400% more discover traffic just for fixing that meta tag.
Stephanie Woodin:
Just for fixing a meta tag.
Tom Crichlow:
So there's stuff like that. Again, I think any individual publisher, yes, Google Discover is a black box. It's hard to optimize for.
Stephanie Woodin:
Sure.
Tom Crichlow:
At the same time, there is a fair amount of things that you can do within your control. And the last thing, just give a plug for my team at Raptive.
Stephanie Woodin:
Plug away.
Tom Crichlow:
We're actually working on a Google Discover workbook that will show you all your Discover data inside the Raptive dashboard. So you can see some of the things I talked about about branded search volume and how [inaudible 00:30:46] of your site is doing. Your Core Web Vitals, so if there's any issues there. As well as some of these basics, like what works best for day of week, performance by author, some of these things that you can't get out of Google Search Console.
Stephanie Woodin:
Wow.
Tom Crichlow:
So I'm really excited. We're building it right now. We're going to be piloting that with creators and publishers probably towards the end of Q1, hopefully trying to get a little bit to that need state that Tim mentioned of not really knowing what to do and not really having any good data. We're hopefully going to help out a little bit.
Stephanie Woodin:
That's huge. And I guess I should take back what I said about needing an intern. You just need to join the Raptive network-
Tom Crichlow:
Exactly.
Stephanie Woodin:
... and get Tom's playbook to know what's happening with Discover. Well, Tom, thank you so much for all of this. This was really fun, and I learned a lot about Discover, and now I'm going to look at it a lot differently when I go in there and see an X post. I'm going to make sure to click on that link and get someone those click-throughs because that's really important. But thank you. We loved having you back. You are a treasure trove of information, and stay warm.
Tom Crichlow:
I love the podcast. I love to be back. Let's make this a recurring thing.
Stephanie Woodin:
Always. Thanks, Tom.
Tom Crichlow:
Thanks.
Stephanie Woodin:
Have a good one. Thanks, Tim and Tom, for a great episode. If you're a creator with a burning question, email us at ctrlaltask@raptive.com and tell us your story. We would love to hear from you.
If you want to learn more about the Discover workbook that Tom mentioned, visit Raptive.com and inquire. And if you're a creator in our Raptive Network already, we'll be letting you know when it's going live.
For more information on everything we talked about today, you can visit the show notes or our website, raptive.com/ctrlaltask.
