How Google REALLY ranks news sites
This breakdown of key Google news patents can help clarify why Google's news ecosystem can feel like the wild west
“Just because Google patented something doesn’t mean it has been or continues to be used in its algorithm.”
True, you pedantic dullard. But there are some telltale signs:
Is the patent cited regularly and recently? This patent (Systems and methods for improving the ranking of news articles) has been cited 159 times and as recently as last year
Does it have international filings? Yes. In the US, China, Japan, the EP (European Patent Office), WO (World Intellectual Property Organization - WIPO/PCT)
Has Google protected the ranking technology around the world? Yes.
Does it broadly align with your understanding of the concept (in this case news)? Very much so.
Overall, it is highly likely this patent continues to be used in Google’s news algorithm.
Right, you’re convinced. Onwards.
Quick PSA, I did ‘borrow’ this idea from Olaf Kopp, who posted about it on Linkedin. He is well worth a follow for SEOs looking to understand more about Google’s inner workings. Which should be all of you.
TL;DR
Google assigns a source rank to news sites based on multiple weighted metrics
High-authority news sites have a significant ranking advantage, but smaller publishers can theoretically compete with exclusive, high-quality reporting
Each article is given a weighted combination of source reputation, past performance, and topical authority
It prioritises source quality, timeliness, and originality over user interaction behaviours
Speed and freshness matter. Being first on the scene, advancing the story and prioritising information gain are crucial for publishers
We all know how important engagement metrics are in traditional Google search. As of 2025 (and I use ‘effectively’ loosely), its algorithm relies less on links and more on clicks.
A recent, brilliant ahrefs study on whether links still matter sheds some bright, beautiful light on the situation.
Has anyone else been incredibly impressed with ahref’s content marketing recently?
Google’s algorithm may have evolved, but its ability to understand content hasn’t. Links were the be all and end all. Since 2019 their importance has dropped by around 25%.
Despite all the bluster around LLMs and how AI makes writers and developers quake in their boots, machines still can’t truly understand content. For years links (and more recently engagement signals) have given Google the next best thing.
What do the hoi polloi think about the content?
Clever manipulation of engagement signals (click quality, pogo-sticking, CTR etc) at scale made it seem like the search engine was becoming human. The blurring of lines between man and machine edges ever closer.
This is until my Samsung TV breaks the fourth wall by rapping at me or something equally stupid. Then I just sneer. Whispering “I know someone like Zuckerburg made you.”
Anyway, nowhere is this clearer than news in my opinion. It may be impossible for a machine to ever understand content like a human. I certainly hope so. Having my writing critiqued by my microwave would violate our terms of agreement.
Heat my coffee cyborg. Fuck off about the rest.
Google makes split second decisions on what to rank in its news ecosystem. So it’s no surprise authoritative news publishers are prioritised over traditional engagement metrics.
Particularly if they have strong international reach. It gives the algorithm more data to make a decision. It presents less risk.
Unfortunately, if your brand is slow, small, and, to be rude, inconsequential, you need to do something extra. Google uses a consensus score of between 0 and 1 to determine site quality. If your site doesn’t score 0.4 or above, you don’t qualify for rich features like featured snippets.
I believe this is exactly how Top Stories works. To get there, you need to go the extra mile. For me, that extra mile is information gain. Adding context and value above and beyond what every other site does on each page. Make your content worth indexing.
And volume. Sweat your assets like nobody’s watching.
Google’s Source Rank system & ranking adjustments
Google assigns a source rank to news sites based on multiple weighted metrics, including:
Popularity: based on traffic, engagement, and inbound links
Breaking news speed: how quickly a publication reports an event
Diversity of sources: the range of citations from different regions and outlets.
Article-level scoring: a weighted combination of past performance, source reputation, and topical authority
The formula manifests itself like so;
NEWSCORE(D) = (alpha * OLDSCORE(D)) + (beta * SOURCERANK(SOURCE(D)))
Now, if you’re anything like me, you might look at that and think: What the fuck does that mean?
But with a little more digging through Google’s illegible patent ecosystem, it becomes less murky;
NEWSCORE(D): the updated ranking or score of the news document (D)
OLDSCORE(D): the previous score of the document (D), representing how important or relevant it was in past assessments. Past metrics matter.
SOURCERANK(SOURCE(D)): A ranking of the source (news website, journalist, or publisher) that produced the document, indicating its credibility, authority, or influence. Its E-E-A-T ness
α (alpha): a weight assigned to OLDSCORE(D), determining how much past performance influences the new score.
β (beta): a weight assigned to SOURCERANK(SOURCE(D)), determining how much the credibility of the source affects the score.
The score of a new or updated article in the news ecosystem is calculated by defining two things. Analysing how important past performance is on the topic and adding this to the source credibility (author and brand level metrics). The page is then assigned an updated score.
Based on this formula, established brands have a major advantage, as do unpaywalled sites and articles with some past positive metrics. Mainly links and engagement signals. Historical content with positive user and citation signals should be nurtured.
Make sure you update articles over time as the story develops. Link from quality, historical content to new and emerging articles and you use published and updated dates effectively.
Show Google (yes, yes and your users) that you have kept the story developing and that you have significant past expertise in the area.
Core factors influencing Google news rankings
I pulled together a Google Sheet with everything I found from Google’s news ranking patent here. Feel free to make a copy and use them as your own of course.
Equally, we trained our own Custom GPT on the topic. So ask any question you have about news SEO and get a comprehensible answer here.
Breaking these ranking factors down
You can break them down into four or five key categories depending on how pedantic you want to be. Ranging from publisher and source reputation and trust to article and user engagement.
Some of these as an SEO are a little out of your control.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect someone in SEO to be the driving force behind growing a brand (we’re not brand strategists or UX gurus, we just know a bit). So control what you can and make slow steady improvements elsewhere.
Article-level factors
At an individual article-level, Google focuses on;
Relevance to the query. How well does your content answer the user’s intent?
Originality. I referenced information gain earlier. Unless you’re first on the scene, you need to add something new. Make your content stand out.
Freshness. Timeliness of content, particularly breaking news, is important.
CTR. Google stores engagement data in Chrome to help rank articles. Whilst Google uses CTR in Top Stories as a key ranking factor, traditional metrics like click quality of pogo-sticking don’t appear to count. Users can and do get what they need in seconds from news articles. So traditional bounces don’t paint the same picture.
Actionable steps
At an article level, you should make sure that articles align with search intent. Clean up the endless duplicate content and setup processes that help journalists answer the question effectively for users. Making sure the headline(s) is clearly targeted, keyword rich and clickable.
Publish breaking news quickly. If you need placeholders, do it. Moving the story on when more information becomes available. In the likely event you’re not the first on the scene, make your content the richest on the market.
Make sure you update the updated date as the story progresses. Make the it clearly visible on page as your preferred date. Google is inexplicably abysmal at pulling through the updated date on your page. Particularly if it’s not consistent. So try to remove any ambiguity around your on-page, structured data and sitemap date(s).
And for God’s sake, ensure the content is broken up with headers and visuals and well optimised for mobile. Whenever I see a text wall bigger than a full iPhone screen, my plan to run electric currents through the chairs in the newsroom edges closer.
Source level factors and trust
Like everything E-E-A-T related, trust and the reputation of the brand and content creator matter. It matters because Google’s algorithm makes split second decisions and big brands and credible authors with a reputation for quality present a less risky option.
Google measures trust and publisher reputation based on;
Historical brand and author reputation. Topical authority really does matter. The number of articles and citation profiles you have around specific topics plays a huge role in how well you will rank. The more engagement and link signals Google has, the more accurate Google can be.
Authorship. Author transparency, related expertise, bylines and author profile. Where are they featured? How many times? How strong is their personal brand?
External links. Forever, I have said external links are an extension of your article. You have to show where you got your information from if it isn’t first-hand.
Readability and factual accuracy. Primarily related to the sourcing of facts and statements and how easy your content is to read, particularly on mobile. Thanks to Mark Williams-Cook’s work on consensus scores, we know that Google counts the number of passages in content that agree with, contradict, or remain neutral to the “general consensus.” If your facts aren’t facts, you’re not going to rank.
Editorial standards and transparency. Do you make it very clear who you are as a brand and what you stand for? Journalistic integrity matters now more than ever. We’ve done enough research to know that the majority of our users think we’re paid to review products or hotels. We never are, but we don’t make it clear enough.
Actionable steps
Run some user research to understand what your readers really think about your website. Does it tally up with what you want them to think? Or what you think? Establishing what they care about is a step most of us in SEO never get to see.
Make sure you show clear author bylines, showcase their expertise and connect the dots with Author structured data. The more detailed you can be, the more trustworthy your content will be. It will maximise your traffic potential.
If you can, setup a fact-checking process. A challenge, I know. In an era where Facebook and Instagram get rid of their fact checkers, The BBC have BBC Verify, AP News have a fact check and other publishers have hired their own fact checkers.
All of this is about transparency. You have to bring people along for the ride. It’s like politics. Create FAQ and editorial standards pages that answer the right questions. Be open with your audience about your use of AI in newsrooms and own your branded searches.
Your users shouldn’t need to get this information from elsewhere. It’s one of the pain points you can own.
User engagement and behaviour
The only reason links are not as important as they once were is that Google has access to so much real user data.
Links are still the highest-quality signal of trust and value in an industry. People talking about your work in hopefully glowing terms and spreading it around the industry like wildfire is and always will be a good thing.
Algorithm or no algorithm.
The way Google uses engagement data is reasonably well documented. Click-quality and dwell time are key components of Google’s success. But as news is so… newsy? Frenetic might be a better way of describing it. Google has clearly struggled to accurately represent user engagement in a manner that prioritises the most valuable content.
According to this patent, while engagement metrics like CTR and traffic play a role, Google's news ranking system does not heavily rely on engagement metrics like scroll depth, time on page, session duration, or link clicks in the same way that evergreen content does.
Instead, it prioritises source quality, timeliness, and originality over user interaction behaviours.
However, there are some key engagement metrics and patterns to consider;
CTR: CTR is much more prominent than in evergreen results. News isn’t there to satiate forever. It’s there to encapsulate a moment in time. And CTR is a great predictor of what captures the imagination right off the bat
User selection patterns: This preference is factored into rankings if users repeatedly click on one source over another. I imagine this will become even more important, particularly in a personalised world.
Traffic volumes and referral patterns: The more traffic you get from multiple sources, the more powerful the engagement signal. Basically the more data Google can collect about your site en masse, the better
Actionable approach
Google News is a numbers game. Sad, but it’s true. The more you publish about specific topics the better. The more referral traffic, shares, citations and mentions you receive the better.
Fortunately, CTR matters too. So your image, title and descriptive text should be as good as possible. Barry Adam’s review of the five headlines Google cares about is well worth reading.
You need to be clickable. And I don’t just mean at an article level. I mean as a brand. If you outperform the status quo, that’s a huge signifier of trust. Becoming a strong brand built on original, reputable content makes you more clickable to users and sends excellent signals to search engines.
And build linkable assets. If you’re a paywalled site, consider unpaywalling content that drives a significant number of links and mentions. Become known for something. The Times Rich List is a good example.
Technical and structural factors
Without going into too much detail, this is pretty straightforward. You need to create a fast loading site easy for users and crawlers to find what they want. Amplify trust and a sound, connected brand with quality technical SEO.
Structured data. NewsArticle structured data for your articles, Author structured data to connect the dots of your author profiles, LiveBlogPosting structured data to tell Google your page is live (people and Google love live blogs) to generate the live badge in search results
XML sitemaps. For news sites, an effective Google News Sitemap is still important. I have always found the value of sitemaps to be less about fast indexation and more about analysing potential indexing issues with sections of your site.
Site speed. Make sure your CWV metrics are up to scratch. That’s step one. Once that’s in place you can start looking at nicher speed improvements. Predictive page preloading with the speculation API based on user data or using back/forward cache as an example.
Server side vs client side rendering. Yes, Google has improved its ability to crawl and render Javascript. We use iframes across the site and content in them is sporadically picked up as part of the page. When our live blog posts were rendered on the client side, some posts were never picked up and others took hours compared to minutes for other publishers.
Actionable approach
Work with your dev team to establish existing performance data with RUM data. I love the new CRUX tool because it contextualises how well you perform compared to the competition. Then improve your performance at a page template level to move metrics from red, to amber to green in Google’s CWV report.
Remembering that there’s a 28 day lag in the data of course.
Ensure you have appropriate and accurate structured data for each page template. It should establish accurate published and updated dates, author(s), image and headline(s). Accuracy is everything.
Whatever you do, make the majority of your content is rendered on the server side. There is a lag between how Google crawls lightweight html and the foundations of a page vs Javascript.
I suggest asking your dev team whether they know of any content rendered on the client side. I use this view rendered source plugin to see how the browser has constructed a page's original HTML into a functioning DOM and to understand how search engines see your pages.
And create a real time Google News Sitemap as a minimum.
Don’t fall into the classic Core Web Vitals trap. Once everything is largely green and orange, there is very little benefit of continuing to optimise for speed. Invest more in your content. Speed only raises the ceiling of your content’s ability to rank. It doesn’t improve the quality of the page itself.
Unless it’s a problem, site speed is a tiny ranking factor.
That’s it
So if you’re a smaller publisher, you have to focus on generating high-quality backlinks and mentions from reputable sources. There’s a reason why Google trots out the ‘create helpful content’ line time and time again. They want you to focus on generating top quality links because that is the easiest signal for their algorithm to rank.
Smaller news brands considering digital PR campaigns and canny growth tactics to boost their credibility will be the winners.
Be fast. Be accurate. Be unique. I think that’s a pretty good summary. Oh and feed the algorithm with an enormous amount of content. Think of it as a blood sacrifice to our ravenous overlords.
