#SEOWeek Notes
Speaker: John Shehata
Key points:
Google Discover now drives 75% of Google traffic for tracked publishers, up from 37% in 2023, and CTR is 6x search.
Discover is not a different algorithm. It is search results sorted by personal interest and pushed to a feed.
John mapped the full Discover pipeline (about 20 sub-pipelines across ingestion, sorting, eligibility, assembly, and feedback) using NewzDash data on 100 trillion impressions and 55 million pages.
February 2026 was Google's first-ever Discover-specific core update. Winners: local stories, evergreen content, YouTube, X (with link cards), human-face images, longer headlines (12 to 15 words), em dashes (yes, really).
Losers: listicles, international generalist publishers, sites with image quality below 1200px, sites pretending expertise outside their core topic.
Notes: https://lnkd.in/eW5mKkVU
