Google Discover and Top Stories Audit for News Publishers

Discover traffic tends to collapse in a single week, not over a quarter. Across the eleven publisher accounts we have rebuilt since 2022, the fall showed up in the Search Console Discover report as a 60 to 80 percent drop inside seven days, and in nine of them the cause was already sitting in the data beforehand: lead images under the 1200 pixel width minimum, an article type Google had quietly stopped treating as news, or a CMS release that broke canonical tags and publication dates at scale. This audit tells you which one is yours, with the evidence attached, in about three weeks. We start in your data, not on your homepage. Search Console Discover report at page and country level, the Google News performance split, the URL Inspection API across a sample of 300 to 500 URLs weighted toward your highest-value desks, your Google News publisher settings and Publisher Center configuration, news sitemap behaviour and whether lastmod tells the truth, plus a crawl of the live site and one render check per template. What we examine: Eligibility by content type. Your desks do not perform as one site. We split output by desk and format, then show which formats still earn Discover impressions and which stopped, with dates. Top Stories eligibility. Latency from publish to first appearance, news sitemap coverage, paywall markup if you run one, and whether your AMP or non-AMP decision still matches how you actually get cited. Article structured data. NewsArticle against Article, headline length against the rendered H1, datePublished and dateModified behaviour when an editor updates a live story, author markup that resolves to a real author page rather than a string. Images. Width, aspect ratio, the max-image-preview large directive, and whether your lead image survives your own CDN transformation. This is the most common single fix we hand over. The technical health that gates news traffic. Crawl budget lost to archive and tag pages, render-blocking on the article template, mobile Core Web Vitals on article views, and any server behaviour that delays the first crawl of a fresh URL. Editorial patterns. The headline and deck relationship, publication timing against the event, and the update-versus-republish decision your editors make under deadline. What you receive: A findings document ordered by expected traffic effect, where every claim names its source, so your team can check us. A fix specification written for your developers and your CMS, at the level of field names and template files rather than advice. A 90 minute working session with your editors and whoever owns the CMS, recorded, because the editorial half of this never survives a PDF. Sixty days of email access for the questions that come up during implementation. Not included: We do not write or edit your articles. We do not buy or build links. We do not run ongoing rank tracking, and we do not take control of your Publisher Center account. If the audit concludes that your problem is editorial rather than technical, we will say so and the deliverable will be shorter than you expected. That has happened twice. This is the wrong service if: You need a number promised in advance. You do not publish news or timely content, in which case a standard SEO audit serves you better and costs less. Nobody on your side can ship a CMS change this quarter, because findings you cannot implement are an expensive document. Or you have already bought two audits this year and what you actually need is someone to do the work. On volatility: Discover is an unpredictable surface. Traffic moves on ranking changes we cannot see and on interest signals nobody controls, and a publisher can do everything right and still lose a quarter. What an audit does is remove the reasons Google has to exclude you, and tell you honestly which of your losses were self-inflicted. We will not forecast a recovery figure, and you should be careful with anyone who does.