I also discussed this in through details with Edward Sturm on his daily show.

I recommend watching to better get some idea about what’s going on with these listicles and what I think is going to be future of how Google decides what to show when someone is search for best related queries like best shoes or best CRM.

Really important key point I posted in this tweet

Rich and Visual local results are rolling out now in Gemini App and on web too.
Here is how this looks like - it shows you sort of AI organised information in a panel which of course is like usual Google Business Profile (GBP) panel.

For a long time Google has been consider Discover as part of Google Search from the policies perspective and even for algorithmic updates as well like most core or spam updates impact Discover too. But now it seems to be changing somewhat I guess.

Now Google is clearly saying Discover is “Minimal alignment to Search ranking gives us tools we need to combat emerging abuse” so I guess things are going to change now & there will be some decoupling of Google Search and Google Discover.

Moreover Googler told Barry Schwartz (who was there at the event) that “Google Discover team wants to be able to highlight and promote content from smaller publishers, ones that may not rank well in Google Search. He said Google Discover aims to do that and to do that, it can't just use Google's quality signals to only promote the most authoritative sites and content.”

Which is great for SMB publishers I think but still we will have to wait and see how Google is actually going to implement this.

Also following is why I think Google still want to keep SMB publishers alive - its not about them rather its more about Gemini 👀

Moreover Google Discover probably will getting some more personalised features soon!

OpenAI might be using Google Search

Preferred Sources feature initially was launched by Google back in August, that’s when I wrote this post encouraging Publishers Student Marketing Campaigns where you are trying to get more and more people to set yourself as a preferred source. And now this feature is going globally instead of just being available to use search users in US only.

Moreover, I found it really interesting that Google shared this key data point.
“People have selected a wide range of preferred sources — nearly 90,000 unique sources, from local blogs to global news outlets. When someone picks a preferred source, they click to that site twice as much on average.”

Right now, preferred sources is going live for English language users in all the countries globally and Google also said for other languages, they are going to roll it out early next year.

Now Google is working to improve the visibility of links and share more information about what that link is sort of like a brief in the AI mode citations. Here is how it looked like.

This is somewhat concerning actually - What Google is doing right now is partnerships with specific publishers from different countries and what will happen is that Google will pay those publishers and in return will get the rights to use their content in different AI surfaces and now they are starting with AI summaries in Google News.

Here’s how this look

From my perspective this is a great idea if it is implemented equally where every publisher is given the opportunity to participate in this program.

For example, there is an expression of interest or some sort of form from Google which any publisher can fill and stand a chance to get selected for this kind of paid partnership but right now that did not happen.

Google just announced that they have done the partnerships with some big publisher names and now they are going to use show their content and show it as summaries in Google News.