# Google Discover Readiness — The 14 Signals That Actually Drive Placement Discover is Google's quietly enormous discovery surface. Most articles miss one of three things — hero image width, max-image-preview:large, or NewsArticle schema. This audit catches all three in one pass. Author: J.A. Watte Published: April 20, 2026 Source: https://jwatte.com/blog/blog-tool-discover-readiness/ --- Discover quietly became one of the largest referral sources on the open web. An article that lands in a user's Discover feed gets more traffic in a day than the same article sitting at position six in search gets in a month. And unlike ranked search, there's no keyword you can optimize for. Discover is a feed ranking; you're either eligible or you aren't. The [Discover Readiness Audit](/tools/discover-readiness/) is a 14-signal check against the eligibility rules. Paste an article URL. You find out in 15 seconds. ## What fails most often The same three things, in this order: **1. The hero image isn't wide enough.** Google's requirement is 1200 pixels minimum on the longest side, and the image has to be the one Discover pulls. Usually `og:image`, sometimes the first `` the crawler sees. If your CDN serves a 600-pixel responsive variant to mobile user agents, you lose eligibility even though your desktop site looks fine. The audit fetches the image with a `HEAD` request and flags width when it can read it. **2. `max-image-preview:large` is missing.** Without this meta tag, Discover shows a thumbnail-sized image instead of the full card. The difference in click-through is roughly 3x. Add it to the `` of every article: ``. **3. There's no `NewsArticle` or `BlogPosting` schema.** Discover strongly favors articles with schema that declares `datePublished`, `author` as a `Person` or `Organization`, and `image`. A bare `
` tag with no JSON-LD is eligible in theory and never chosen in practice. ## What else matters The audit also checks: publish freshness (30 days is the soft cutoff), author byline visibility, NewsArticle vs BlogPosting schema choice, viewport zoom allowed, word count, `X-Robots-Tag` header for a noindex override, and `dateModified` as a secondary freshness signal. The output is a numeric score (0-100), a list of failed checks grouped by severity, and an AI fix prompt that takes all of them to Claude for exact code. ## How Discover differs from Search You can't keyword your way in. Discover ranks on user-interest match against the article's entities, quality signals, and hero imagery. Three implications: - Thin articles don't ever make Discover, regardless of keywords. Under 400 words is usually a dead stop. - The `NewsArticle`/`BlogPosting` distinction matters more than in Search. Pick the right one; don't hedge. - Your author entity. The `Person` schema with `sameAs` and `knowsAbout`. Carries weight. That's why [the E-E-A-T Audit](/tools/eeat-analyzer/) pairs well with this one. ## The book reference Chapter 28 of [The $20 Dollar Agency](https://the20dollaragency.com/). *Mobile-First & PWA*. Is the context. Discover is a mobile-first feed, ranked by mobile crawling. Chapter 14 of [The $100 Network](https://the100dollarnetwork.com/). *Dynamic OG Images, Social Cards, and Visual Assets*. Covers the hero-image pipeline you need to hit the width requirement reliably across a large content base. --- Canonical HTML: https://jwatte.com/blog/blog-tool-discover-readiness/ RSS: https://jwatte.com/feed.xml JSON Feed: https://jwatte.com/feed.json Hero image: https://jwatte.com/images/blog-tool-discover-readiness.webp