How news works on Google

Google aims to make it easier to stay informed by using technology to organize and help people access information about current issues and events. News experiences across Google are built to help you easily find news from a diversity of trusted sources so you can stay up-to-date and informed on the stories that matter most to you.

Three people and a dog contemplate displays of digital news

Connecting you to news sources from around the world

Using technology to connect you to information

Technology enables us to organize millions of news stories in dozens of languages and make them discoverable to anyone, any minute of the day. Google’s automated systems, called algorithms, analyze hundreds of different factors to identify and organize the stories being covered around the world.

In some cases, we may highlight designated topical experiences, but our primary approach is to use technology to reflect the news landscape, and leave editorial decisions to publishers.

A person browses news windows with icons representing information quality
A person browses news windows with icons representing information quality
A person browses news windows with icons representing information quality

Providing access to context and multiple perspectives

Part of understanding the news is learning from multiple sources and being aware of a story’s broader context. Google’s news experiences connect you with sources from your local community, country, and across the globe, working in a variety of languages and formats.

Our goal is to connect you with a broad array of perspectives and reporting to help you develop your own informed opinions. When helpful to understand a developing story, we may highlight and curate topical experiences to provide context and related perspectives around a single news event or topic.

Three people interacting with a variety of news sources

Organizing news from around the web

Google uses technology to sort massive amounts of content to connect you with news predicted to be important, relevant, and useful.

We intend to surface sources that create content about current issues, events, and important topics, and we take steps to ensure that sources adhere to our news policies, which include requirements for transparency.

Illustration of multiple news sources being organized on a laptop screen
Illustration of multiple news sources being organized on a laptop screen

Elevating trustworthy sources

Google strives to make it easy for you to find trustworthy information and to know where that information is coming from. Our algorithms are designed to elevate news from expert and authoritative sources, and we require publishers to be transparent about behaviors like site ownership, article authorship, bylines, and more in order to be represented in news results.

Fighting deceptive practices

Our news policies target bad behavior, regardless of political perspective. We do not allow sources that misrepresent themselves with regard to their ownership or primary purpose. This includes sources that misrepresent their country of origin or that work together in ways that mislead users about their editorial relationships or independence.

How we rank news content

Our news algorithms use a range of factors to influence ranking. Some of these are:

Relevance

Relevance

Relevance to your search terms is a key factor in determining what you see for query-based experiences like “Top stories” in Google Search. A piece of content is relevant if it has the information you’re looking for. The most basic signal that information is relevant is when an article contains the same keywords as your search, but our algorithms also have more advanced ways to determine relevance.

Location

Location

Where you’re searching from influences which results you see. We use where you are to help you find content relevant to your area, such as the Local section in Google News. If you’re in the United States and you search for “football,” Google will most likely show you results about the American sport, as opposed to other versions of the sport.

Prominence

Prominence

Prominence is a way to identify noteworthy news events. For example, our news algorithms take into account if news sources are heavily covering a particular news story and are featuring that coverage prominently on their sites, if a story has been highly cited by other sources, and if something contains significant original reporting.

Authoritativeness

Authoritativeness

Signals help prioritize high-quality information from the most reliable sources available. To do this, our systems are designed to identify signals that can help determine which pages demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness on a given topic. Those signals can include whether other people value the source for similar queries or whether other prominent websites on the subject link to the content.

Freshness

Freshness

Freshness refers to how recently the content was published and how important this is in the context of the subject. When news is happening, our algorithms may determine that a story with up-to-date information is likely more useful than an older one.

Usability

Usability

Usability assesses how easy it is to view content on a site, such as whether the site appears correctly in different browsers; whether it is designed for all device types and sizes, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones; and whether the page loading times work well for users with slow Internet connections. Paywalls have no impact on usability in news on Google.

Interests

Interests

Your interests may help determine results in personalized content experiences such as Discover and the For You tab in Google News. You may see articles that match interests you’ve specified or that we inferred from your past activity on Google products, depending on your activity settings. Our systems do not attempt to rank content based on any political or ideological point of view, nor do they attempt to infer the points of view of our users or of the content we rank.

How we don't rank news content

Our news algorithms are not designed to use the following factors to influence ranking:

Ideological or political leanings

Ideological or political leanings

While some personalized news experiences are designed to connect you with stories you may be interested in, none of our systems endeavor to assess a publisher’s—or a user’s—ideological or political leanings.

Ad sales or commercial relationships

Ad sales or commercial relationships

We take measures to ensure that Google’s commercial relationships do not impact the design of our news algorithms. Advertisers and partners do not receive special treatment with regard to how we surface news articles.

Personal information

Personal information

We avoid using personal information such as gender, religious beliefs, age, health information, race, or other sensitive characteristics as part of our news algorithms.

Expanding access to news

We aim to help everyone access and understand the news through our products and experiences, including Google News, “Top stories” and other features in Search, Discover, YouTube, and Assistant.

Presenting news results in helpful ways

Whether you’re checking in to see the top news of the day or looking to dive deeper on an issue, we aim to connect you with the information you’re seeking, in the places and formats that are right for you.

Top news, for everyone

If you want to keep up with the news, you need to know what the important stories are at any point in time. With sections such as Top Stories in Search, the News tab, Headlines & search within Google News, news on the Assistant, and Breaking News on YouTube, our systems identify the major stories of the moment. These results are not personalized to individuals, but do vary depending on region, language and location settings.

Google’s technology analyzes news across the web to determine the top stories that will show up for everyone with the same language settings in a given country, based primarily on what publishers are writing about. Once these stories are identified, algorithms then select which specific content to surface and link to for each story, based on factors such as the prominence and freshness of the piece of content, and authoritativeness of the source.

Two people considering a variety of news sources
Two people considering a variety of news sources

Deep context and diverse perspectives

A central goal of Google’s news experiences is to provide access to context and diverse perspectives for stories in the news. By featuring unpersonalized news from a broad range of sources, Google empowers people to deepen their understanding of current events and offers an alternative to exclusively personalized news feeds and individual sources that might only represent a single perspective.

In some news experiences, such as “Full Coverage” in Google News, we show related results from a variety of sources around a specific topic or story. These results are not personalized. In providing additional context on a story, we sometimes include links to videos, subscribed sources, fact check articles, and other types of content. Algorithms determine which content to show, and in which order, based on a variety of signals such as authoritativeness, relevance, and freshness.

News sources organized and displayed on a mobile device

News personalized for you

Several places where you’ll find news across Google show results that are personalized for you. These include Discover, the For You tab in Google News, and the News tab of the YouTube app on TVs. Our aim is to help you stay informed about the subjects that matter to you, including your interests and local community.

Google relies on two main ways to determine what news may be interesting to you. In the experiences mentioned above, you can specify the topics, locations, and sources you’re interested in, and you’ll be shown news results that relate to these selections. Additionally, depending on your activity settings, our algorithms may suggest content based on your past activity on Google products.

You can control what account activity is used to customize your news experiences, including adjusting what data is saved to your Google account, at myaccount.google.com.

A person uses their laptop to view personalized news results

Helping sustain a healthy news ecosystem

An independent and thriving ecosystem of news sources representing diverse perspectives is essential to our mission, and to a well-informed society. We want to ensure not only that users can readily discover a diverse range of authoritative reporting, but that news partners benefit from creating it.

Through programs like the Google News Initiative and Google News Showcase, or products like Journalist Studio and Revenue Reader, we aim to help journalism flourish by helping reporters do their work securely and efficiently, and bring new audiences to publishers.

Tools and resources for journalists and news publishers:

Google News Initiative
Journalist Studio
Google News Showcase
Revenue Reader

Discover more