Google To Consider Allowing Publishers To Exclude Content From Google Discover

Google may allow publishers to exclude some of their content from being displayed in Google Discover. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said he thinks that option would be useful and thus passed it on to the team to look into.

Lily Ray asked about this on X and said, “Outside of your guidelines for SafeSearch – has Google considered a mechanism to prevent individual pages from being considered for News/Discover?”

Sullivan replied on X saying, “John and I pinged, and we’re pretty sure there’s not an option to just block content from Discover. That would seem useful, so we’ll pass it on.”

I do wonder if blocking content from showing in Google News, which you can do, will help that content from also not showing in Google Discover. But we all know that Discover can show content that does not show in Google News…

Here are those posts about this within context:

Hi @searchliaison – we have experienced many situations with publisher clients where it would be helpful to prevent some content from being crawled/indexed specifically for Google News & Discover.

However, this content often performs incredibly well in organic search, so it’s…

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) July 15, 2024

John and I pinged, and we’re pretty sure there’s not an option to just block content from Discover. That would seem useful, so we’ll pass it on.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) July 15, 2024

Forum discussion at X.