Google enforces strict content policies that publishers must follow to be featured in Google News, Discover, or the Top Stories carousel.
This guide serves as a ‘map’ to help you navigate the essential content requirements, summarizing everything you need to know in bite-sized, actionable insights—without the need to sift through endless pages of Google documentation.
It’s the perfect resource for understanding the key policies and ensuring your content strategy aligns with Google’s expectations.
To appear in Google News, Discover, or the Top Stories carousel, publishers must follow strict content policies at three levels:
- Overall content policies – Related to all of Google’s platforms and results.
- Search feature policies – Related to specific search features, not for regular web results.
- Feature specific policies – Related to some search features that have specific policies linked to the particular ways they work.
Google Search Content Policies
These policies apply to all content surfaced in Google Search, including web pages, images, videos, and news content. Google aims to provide users with trustworthy and relevant information while filtering out harmful, misleading, or inappropriate content.
Content Google Removes from Search
- Child sexual abuse or exploitation: Google blocks results leading to such content.
- Highly personal information: Includes sensitive or private data.
- Spam: Deceptive content designed to manipulate rankings.
Site owner requests: Content removed at the request of the website owner. - Legal requests: Content removed under laws such as the U.S. DMCA. These requests can be monitored on the Lumen database.
Google Search Feature Policies
These policies apply to various Google search features, ensuring that content meets specific guidelines for enhanced visibility. Publishers can still rank in regular web results even if they don’t comply with these policies, but non-compliance will prevent them from appearing in specific search features.
“Search features covered by these policies include panels, carousels, enhancements to web listings… predictive and refinement features, and results and features spoken aloud. These policies don’t apply to web results.” Google Search Help
Content Restricted from Search Features
- Advertisements: Content that primarily promotes products or services.
- Dangerous content: Includes self-harm, drug abuse, and dangerous activities.
- Deceptive practices: Impersonation, misrepresentation, or inauthentic behavior.
- Harassing content: Bullying, threats, or targeted abuse.
- Hateful content: Inciting hatred or violence against individuals or groups.
- Manipulated media: Misleading edits to images, audio, or video.
- Medical content: Information contradicting scientific consensus.
- Regulated goods: Promotion or sale of restricted items like tobacco, weapons, or pharmaceuticals.
- Sexually explicit content: Nudity or graphic sexual material (except educational/scientific references).
- Terrorist content: Promoting or glorifying terrorism.
Violence and vulgarity: Content intended to shock or sensationalize.
Feature-Specific Policies
Some search features have additional requirements due to their nature.
Notable Policies
- Google News: Follows standard search feature policies but also requires transparency (clear authorship, publication details, and company information).
- Google Discover: Includes all search feature policies plus specific rules for election content and transparency.
- Image and Video Boxes: Must align with search feature policies.
- Structured Data: Must follow Google’s structured data guidelines.
- Featured Snippets: Must not contradict expert consensus on public interest topics.
Google News Content Policies
“Google’s content policies continue to play an important role in providing a quality experience for users and publishers. Google takes steps to ensure that articles that appear in our news experiences adhere to our content policies, which include requirements for transparency and accountability.” Google’s Publisher Center FAQ’s.
To appear in Google News, publishers must comply with additional policies:
Requirements for News Content
Ad and Sponsored Content
- Advertising and paid promotions shouldn’t exceed the page content.
- Sponsored content should be marked as such.
“Sponsorship, including, but not limited to, ownership or affiliate interest, payment, or material support, should be clearly disclosed to readers.” – Publisher Center Help
Copyrighted Content
Content on the website should be genuine and not infringe on intellectual property rights. Google’s copyright policies
Dangerous Content
Content should not facilitate serious and immediate harm to people or animals.
Deceptive Practices
Sites should be transparent and not misrepresent or conceal their ownership, primary purpose, or country of origin. And, they should not conceal direct content for users in another country under false premises, or information about their relationships or editorial independence.
Harassing Content
“We do not allow harassment, bullying, or threatening content, including but not limited to, that which might single someone out for malicious abuse, threaten someone with serious harm, sexualize someone in an unwanted way, expose the private information of someone else that could be used to carry out threats, disparage, or belittle victims of violence or tragedy, deny an atrocity, or harass in other ways.” – Publisher Center Help
Hateful Content
Content shouldn’t promote violence or have the purpose of inciting hatred against an individual or a group, based on race, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, or any other characteristic.
Manipulated Media
Google doesn’t allow audio, video, or image content that has been manipulated to deceive, defraud or mislead that can cause harm to groups or individuals.
Medical Content
Google doesn’t allow content that contradicts scientific or medical proven best practices.
Personal and Confidential Information
Sharing a private person’s confidential and personally identifiable information is prohibited.
Sexually Explicit Content
Content should not contain sexual imagery or video primarily intended to cause sexual arousal.
Spam and Malware
Content shouldn’t be repetitive, duplicate, unoriginal or contain artificial freshening, misspelling, grammatical errors, or gimmicky character use.
Google also doesn’t allow links to malware, viruses, or other harmful software or link schemes intended to manipulate a site’s ranking.
Terrorist Content
Content that promotes terrorist or extremist acts will be excluded.
Transparency
The site should provide clear dates, bylines, and information about authors, the publication, the publisher, the company, or the network behind it. In June 2021, Google shared some advice regarding its transparency policies and how it looks at news sources. Transparency is broken down into two levels:
- Article transparency – Factors that help Google “consider information that helps users quickly gain context about articles or the journalists covering stories.”
- Providing a byline with a link to a bio of the author.
- Publishing and modification dates
- Labeling the article type – Opinion or News.
- Site-level transparency – “information that helps readers understand a site’s purpose, its organizational structure, and the kinds of information they can expect from that site.”
- Mission statement
- Editorial policies and standards
- Staff information and bios
- Contact information
- Organizational-level information such as owners and/or funding sources.
Violence and Gore Content
“We do not allow violent or gory content that’s primarily intended to be shocking, sensational, or gratuitous.” Publisher Center Help
Vulgar Language and Profanity
Gratuitous obscenities or profanity is prohibited.
Additional Content that must be blocked from Google News
These kinds of content can appear on your publication, but they must be blocked from Google.
- Syndicated or republished content – whenever non-original content is published (whether or not with permission), Google encourages publishers to block such content from Googlebot, or at least make use of canonicals.
- Scraped content – this is content that has been automatically taken from other publishers.
- Paid and Unnatural links – paid content, or links that have been sold for ranking purposes (off-page practices) must be either marked with a ‘nofollow’ or ‘sponsored’ link real attributes or blocked by robots.txt.
For content removal from Google News, refer to Google’s Help Center.
Google Discover Content Policies
Google Discover follows Search and News content policies with extra editorial requirements:
- Page Titles: Titles should summarize content without clickbait.
- Misleading Previews: Avoid exaggerated details in titles, snippets, or images.
- Quality Content: Content should be relevant, informative, and engaging.
Content Excluded from Google Discover
- Content that does not follow the Google Discover Content Guidelines.
- Job applications, petitions, and forms
- Code repositories
- Satirical content
Final Thoughts
Google’s content policies exist to ensure that search results remain a reliable source of factual information. Publishers who fail to comply risk losing visibility, especially in premium features like Google News and Discover. Many publishers remain unaware of these policies, putting them at risk of penalties or de-indexing.
By understanding and adhering to Google’s policies, publishers can avoid common pitfalls and maintain their presence on Google’s platforms. Transparency, factual accuracy, and compliance with editorial guidelines are key to success in search rankings.
Google’s content policies exist to ensure that search results remain a reliable source of factual information. Publishers who fail to comply risk losing visibility, especially in premium features like Google News and Discover.
A major challenge for publishers is balancing content policies with monetization. When revenue strategies, such as ad placement, conflict with policy guidelines, publishers must navigate tough choices that can impact their visibility and earnings. Understanding these policies is crucial to making informed decisions and avoiding penalties or de-indexing.
By understanding and adhering to Google’s policies, publishers can avoid common pitfalls and maintain their presence on Google’s platforms. Transparency, factual accuracy, and compliance with editorial guidelines are key to success in search rankings.
For guidance on aligning your content strategy with Google’s policies while maximizing monetization, consult our team today.
