Google's February 2026 Discover Core Update

Thursday, February 5, 2026

Today we’ve released
the February 2026 Discover core update. This is a broad update to our systems that surface
articles in Discover. Our testing shows that people find the Discover experience more useful and
worthwhile with this update.

This update will improve the experience in a few key ways:

• Showing users more locally relevant content from websites based in their country
• Reducing sensational content and clickbait in Discover
• Showing more in-depth, original, and timely content from websites with expertise in a given
  area, based on our systems’ understanding of a site’s content

Since many sites demonstrate deep knowledge across a wide range of subjects, our systems are
designed to identify expertise on a topic-by-topic basis. So whether a site has expertise in
multiple areas or has a deep focus on a single topic, there’s equal opportunity to show up in
Discover. For example, a local news site with a dedicated gardening section could have established
expertise in gardening, even though it covers other topics. In contrast, a movie review site that
wrote a single article about gardening would likely not.

We’ll continue to show content that’s personalized based on people’s creator and source preferences.

As with all core updates, this change may lead to fluctuations in Discover traffic. Some sites
might see increases or decreases; many sites may see no change at all. We’re releasing this
update to English language users in the US, and will expand it to all countries and languages
in the months ahead.

For site owners seeking guidance, our general guidance about core updates
applies, as does our Get on Discover help page.

Should you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us on
LinkedIn,
or join our Search Central help community
to discuss among peers.

Posted by John Mueller,
Search Advocate, Google