Google has told us that core updates impact visibility within Google Discover, but that may have changed at some point. Andy Almeida from the Google Trust and Safety spoke about Google Discover and one of his slides wrote, "Minimal alignment to Search ranking..."
He presented this at the Google Search Central Live event at Zurich yesterday, I posted the slide on X and here it is:
Glenn Gabe asked me to find out more about this, so I did:
I was able to meet up with Andy Almeida and ask him to clarify this. He told me, and I am not quoting, but going off what I remember he told me, that the Google Discover team wants to be able to highlight and promote content from smaller publishers, ones that may not rank well in Google Search. He said Google Discover aims to do that and to do that, it can't just use Google's quality signals to only promote the most authoritative sites and content.
Instead, a site doesn't need to rank highly in Google Search for it to be promoted in Google Discover. This allows smaller, lesser known, publishers to do well in Google Discover, even if they don't currently rank well in Google Search.
He told me that you don't even have to rank for most of your queries to show up in Google Discover at the current state.
I think, this is maybe partially why Google Discover has such a spam problem. It is way easier to take a new domain and get it to rank in Google Discover than in Google Search because of this.
I asked if this is a delicate tweak between using Google Search trust signals and not, so you can balance showing new or lesser known publishers while also trying not to let spam junk up the Google Discover feed. He nodded.
That is how I understood these slides based on my follow up questions.
I am not there, but that second line sure caught my attention. We know that Discover is an extension of Search, but Google just presented "Minimal alignment to Search ranking gives us the tools we need to combat emerging abuse". I'm trying to find more info about that line, but I… https://t.co/kNFbuBghbN
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) December 9, 2025
Forum discussion at X.
