How To Analyze Google Discover

TL;DR

To generate the most value from Discover, view it through an entity‑focused lens – people, places, organisations, teams, etc.
Your best chance of success with an individual article is to make sure it outperforms its expected performance early. So share, share, share.
Then analyze the type of content you create. What makes it clickable? What resonates? What headline‑and‑image combination works?
High CTR is key for success, but “curiosity‑gap” headlines that fail to deliver kill long‑term credibility. User satisfaction trumps clickiness over time.

Discover isn’t a completely black box. We have a decent idea of how it works and can reverse‑engineer more value with some smart analysis.

Yes, there will always be surprises. It can feel mental at times, but we can make the most of the platform without destroying our credibility by publishing articles like:

“Outlive your children with this one secret trick the government don’t want you to know about.”

Key Tenets Of Discover

Search and Discover are intrinsically linked. Google admitted this at their Zurich Search Central conference:

“Sustained presence on search helps maintain your status as a trustworthy publisher.”
Discover feeds off fresh content. Evergreen pieces appear, but they are closely tied to news.
More lifestyle‑y, engaging content tends to thrive on the click‑less platform.
Like news, Discover is very entity, click, and early‑engagement driven.
The personalized platform groups cohorts of people together – satiate one, and more of that cohort will follow.
If your content outperforms its predicted early‑stage performance, it is more likely to be boosted.
Once the groups of potentially interested doom‑scrollers have been saturated, performance naturally drops off.
Google is empowering the ability to find individual creators and video content on the platform, because people trust people and like watching stuff.

What Data Points Should You Analyze?

Focus on the metrics that matter for SEO or analysis:

CTR
Entities
Subfolders
Authorship
Headlines and images
Content type (news, how‑tos, interviews, evergreen guides, etc.)
Publishing performance

You need existing Discover traffic to generate value from this analysis. If you don’t have it yet, keep creating high‑quality, unique content in your niche(s) and push it out widely.

Note: You can’t accurately identify Discover traffic in analytics platforms. Some of it will be mis‑attributed; most companies make an educated guess using a combination of Google and mobile/Android data.

CTR

CTR is foundational for news SEO, Top Stories, Discover, and real‑time SEO. It’s weighted alongside traditional engagement data (clicks, on‑page interactions, session duration, etc.) to associate a clickable headline and image with content that serves the user effectively.

To get the most out of CTR, combine it with:

Image type
Headline type (and content type)
Entity analysis

Entity Analysis

Entities are more important in news than any other part of SEO. While entity SEO has been growing for years, news sites have been obsessed with entities (often without knowing it).

Analyze performance at an entity level – people, places, organisations (these three make up ~85 % of all entities you need to care about).
Use a combination of an LLM, a Named Entity Recognition (NER) tool, and either Google’s Knowledge Graph or WikiData to extract and disambiguate entities.

Subfolder

Identify which subfolders generate more impressions and clicks on average in Discover. This is especially valuable for larger sites with many subfolders and high content production.

Generate a list of all subfolders (or topics) and track clicks, impressions, and CTR over time.
Use total clicks, impressions, and CTR, plus an average per article, as a starting point.

Authorship

Google tracks authorship in search, and it matters for E‑E‑A‑T. While the exact weight is unclear, the leak shows that Google values:

Author identification
Academic authorship
Author image
Page quality, freshness, etc.

For Discover, consider:

How many articles an author has that appear in Discover (and perform in Search).
Which topics/entities they perform best with.
Which headline types work for them.

Headline Type

Understanding which headline styles work for you is crucial. Ask questions such as:

Do curiosity‑gap headlines boost CTR?
Do numbered lists perform better?
Do celebrity mentions help?
Does performance differ by subfolder or author?

Define all headline types you use (curiosity gap, localized, numbered lists, questions, how‑to, emotional trigger, first‑person, etc.) and analyze their effectiveness. You can train a machine‑learning model (e.g., via ChatGPT’s API) to categorize headlines automatically.

Tip: Google often uses the OG title more frequently than the traditional H1 for Discover.

Images

Images are as important as headlines. Ensure your featured image meets Google’s recommendation (minimum 1200 px wide). CTR in Discover is driven by:

The headline
The image

Analyze images for:

Human presence and gaze
Facial expression
Emotional resonance
Composition and framing
Colour schemes
Photo type

Use machine learning to bucket images (e.g., “people looking at camera + smiling”) and test which buckets correlate with higher CTR.

Publishing Performance

For high‑volume publishers (hundreds or thousands of articles), publishing cadence matters:

Publishing days – which days generate the most clicks?
Publishing times – what times yield higher engagement?
Content freshness – how recent does content need to be?
Republishing vs. new publishing

Track clicks, impressions, and CTR by day of week and hour of day to inform editorial calendars.

Caution: Discover is volatile; over‑optimising for curiosity‑gap content can lead to short‑term gains but long‑term credibility loss.

How Do You Tie This All Together?

Set clear goals around conversions and traffic.
Identify controllable levers (headlines, images, publishing schedule, entity targeting).
Deliver actionable insights at the desk or subfolder level.

Distinguish between strategic roles (advisory, recommending headline/entity strategies) and tactical roles (directly implementing changes such as headline edits, image swaps, or scheduling).

More Resources

This post was originally published on Leadership in SEO.

Digital Marketing News and Headlines

Why It Matters