# Google News Category: [Structured Data & SERP Features](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/structured-data-serp-features/) › [SERP features & Google services](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/structured-data-serp-features/serp-features-google-services/) **Google News** is a Google service that collects current news from many sources and presents it by relevance, freshness and the user's language and region settings. For SEO the question is how publishers become eligible. The query "Google News" usually means the app or the start page. ## How does content get into Google News? Google may find a site through its normal web crawl. Content from publishers that follows the content policies is automatically eligible for consideration in Google News and other news surfaces. Google says its systems identify and rank eligible content using factors such as relevance, prominence, authoritativeness, freshness, location and language. Eligible content is not guaranteed to rank. The Google News performance report in Search Console shows whether eligible content appears. Blocking Googlebot-News excludes content from Google News. Google says a site can also opt out of Google News without affecting its indexing and ranking in Google Search. ## Which policies apply? News content has to follow Google Search's overall and spam policies and the policies for Search features. These cover dangerous content, deceptive practices, harassing and hateful content, manipulated media, medical content, sexually explicit content, violent extremist content, violent and gory content, and vulgar language. Google News adds rules for ads and sponsored content, misleading preview content and transparency (clear dates and bylines, information about authors, publication and publisher, and contact information). Violations can lead to removal from news surfaces, and repeated or serious ones can end the eligibility of a whole site. The policies apply only to news surfaces, so the same content can still appear elsewhere in Search. Since late March 2025 Google News generates publication pages automatically. It no longer uses RSS feeds or locations submitted in Publisher Center, and it takes logos from site favicons and titles from site names. ## News sitemap A news sitemap tells Google about news articles. It should list only articles from the last two days and can hold up to 1,000 `` tags. Required tags are the publication name, language, publication date and title. ## Example ```xml https://www.example.com/politics/sample-article The Example Times en 2026-10-06T08:30:00+02:00 Sample article ``` ## Common mistakes - **Old articles stay in the news sitemap.** Google wants only URLs of articles from the last two days. Older URLs are removed, or the `` tag is deleted from them. - **More than 1,000 `` tags in one file.** In that case the sitemap should be split into several smaller ones. - **Creating a new sitemap with every update.** Google advises updating the news sitemap with fresh articles instead of creating a new one each time. - **Missing required tags.** Publication name, language, publication date and title are required. ## Related terms - [News sitemap](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/news-sitemap/index.md) - [Top stories](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/top-stories/index.md) - [Google Discover](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/google-discover/index.md) - [Preferred sources](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/preferred-sources/index.md) - [Google Publisher Center](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/google-publisher-center/index.md) ## Sources - [Google News policies – Publisher Center Help](https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/6204050?hl=en) - [Google News transitions to automatically-generated publication pages – Publisher Center Help, 10.02.2025](https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/15898024?hl=en) - [News content across Google – Publisher Center Help](https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9607025?hl=en) - [Create a News Sitemap – Google Search Central](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/news-sitemap) --- Last updated: October 8, 2026 URL: https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/google-news/