UI Best Practices for Google News: Designing Articles That Get Featured and Drive Traffic

📰 Google News Eligibility: What Google Actually Looks For

Google News is not an automatic distribution channel for any website that publishes articles. Google evaluates publishers against a specific set of criteria before surfacing their content in News results, the Discover feed, and the dedicated Google News tab. Understanding these criteria is the first step in designing an article UI that positions your content for News eligibility.

🖼️ Featured Image Requirements for Google News

Images are required for Google News and Discover eligibility. Google has specific requirements that must be satisfied.

🎨 Image quality: Google evaluates image relevance to the article content. A generic stock photo that has no relationship to the article subject performs poorly. An original image, a data visualization, or a highly relevant custom illustration signals editorial investment and content quality.

⚙️ Technical implementation: Images must be accessible to Googlebot — not blocked by robots.txt, not requiring authentication, and served via HTTPS. The image URL must be stable (not changing with each page load). For WordPress sites, setting a featured image on every post is the correct implementation. The image should be referenced in your NewsArticle schema’s image property with accurate width, height, and URL values.

🎯 Article Header UI: The First Impression

The article header is the first content Google and readers encounter. Proper header design signals editorial credibility and improves dwell time — a key ranking factor.

📖 Article Body UI: Optimized for Reading and Ranking

The article body layout directly affects both user experience and Google’s quality assessment. Content width, typography, and visual density all factor in.

📊 Heading hierarchy: Clear H2 and H3 headings that structure the article into scannable sections serve both readers (who scan before committing to reading) and search engines (which use heading structure to understand content organization). Each major section should have a descriptive H2. Subsections within a section should have H3s.

🔧 Structured Data for Google News: NewsArticle Schema

Structured data implementation is not optional for News publishers — it’s a core signal Google uses to understand and categorize content.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "NewsArticle",
  "headline": "Your Article Title Here",
  "image": {
    "@type": "ImageObject",
    "url": "https://yoursite.com/image.jpg",
    "width": 1200,
    "height": 675
  },
  "datePublished": "2026-05-18T08:00:00+00:00",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Author Name"
  }
}

🗺️ Google News Sitemap: The Technical Bridge

A News sitemap is a specialized XML file that tells Google about your most recently published articles. Google specifically recommends News publishers implement and submit a News sitemap via Search Console and Google Publisher Center.

⭐ Optimizing for Google Discover

Google Discover is the personalized content feed that appears on the Google app and the Chrome new tab page on Android. It surfaces content based on user interest signals, not direct searches — making it a unique traffic channel that can drive significant audience growth for publishers who optimize for it.