What Google's own Discover documentation actually requires

Most Discover advice sites describe impact after the fact: which pages gained, which dropped, which update caused it. Google’s own Discover documentation reads differently. It is a checklist of what has to be true about a page before Discover will consider surfacing it at all, and its exact wording rarely survives being paraphrased.

The image requirement, exactly as Google states it#

Google’s page sets a specific floor: images should be “at least 1200 px wide” with “high resolution of more than 300,000 total pixels,” illustrating this with a 16x9 example image at 1280x720 pixels, which comes to 921,600 total pixels. That size requirement is written to work alongside the max-image-preview:large setting, either the meta robots tag or a corresponding HTTP header. Without that setting present, Discover does not apply a large-image treatment to the page regardless of how the image itself is sized, so the pixel floor and the meta setting function as a pair, not two independent options.

Google’s page also states plainly that no special tags or structured data are required for basic Discover eligibility. Where it does make a recommendation, it is narrower than eligibility: use either schema.org markup or an og:image meta tag to tell Google which image on the page to prefer, which is a control over image selection, not a gate on whether the page can appear at all.

Google’s documented content policies for Discover#

Beyond formatting, Google’s Discover page names specific content behaviors it screens for, in its own words. It tells publishers to “avoid clickbait and similar tactics to artificially inflate engagement by using misleading or exaggerated details,” and separately to “avoid sensationalism tactics that manipulate appeal by catering to morbid curiosity, titillation, or outrage.” A third, related standard: content that withholds crucial information required to understand what it is about is treated the same way, even short of outright misleading claims.

The page also lists content types Discover “might not recommend” outright: job applications, petitions, forms, code repositories, and satirical content. These are named as categories, not as penalties for a specific violation, so a page can be well-formed and non-misleading and still sit outside Discover’s surface simply by falling into one of them.

For what these documented policies looked like in practice during a real ranking change, not just as written rules, see our report on Google’s February 2026 Discover-only core update, which covers the verified before-and-after impact data from that rollout. This piece is limited to what Google’s own eligibility page states; it does not repeat that impact analysis.

Why we care#

The two halves of this documentation matter for different reasons. The image spec is a pass or fail technical check: a publishing workflow that ships images narrower than 1200 pixels, or that omits max-image-preview:large, has ruled itself out of Discover’s large-image treatment before any editorial judgment about the article applies. The content policies are the opposite, a set of editorial standards Google states it applies regardless of how technically correct the page is. Treat both as gates to clear before publishing, not diagnostics to run after traffic disappoints.