A newsroom built for Google News

My role

Part of the Cognilium team build. The /tech-news newsroom, its schema, feeds, and Google News eligibility are my work.

The problem

Google News and Discover are a separate discipline from normal SEO, with their own eligibility rules. Get the structure wrong and you simply never appear, no matter how good the writing is.

What I did

Built the /tech-news section to the Google News spec: NewsArticle JSON-LD with Analysis, Opinion, and Reportage subtypes, plus a news:news sitemap in the correct namespace.
Shipped RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds and registered the publication in Google Publisher Center (publication ID on record).
Worked the Discover eligibility checklist (original reporting, no aggregation, clean author and date signals) so the section stays eligible instead of silently dropping out.
Redesigned the newsroom to a Reuters-style layout over four iterations, then fixed the hero-image crop and wrote image rules into the repo so it can't regress.

The result

A live newsroom that is structurally eligible for the Google News carousel and Discover, with feeds and schema that AI answer engines can also read and cite.

The judgment call: what the AI couldn't do

Google News looks like SEO but it's a different rulebook. The model tells you to 'write good articles', but eligibility is structural: the wrong NewsArticle subtype or a missing news sitemap and you're invisible no matter how good the writing is. Knowing it's a separate discipline is the whole thing.

By the numbers

Google News publication (live)

NewsArticle schema types

syndicated feeds

See it

Proof

Verify: View-source the NewsArticle schema and the news sitemap.

Take it with you

News-SEO / Discover research (PNG)Download ↓

← Previous

A self-maintaining SEO/GEO stack

One publish, six platforms

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News-SEO / Google News · all work

A newsroom built for Google News

My role

Part of the Cognilium team build. The /tech-news newsroom, its schema, feeds, and Google News eligibility are my work.

The problem

Google News and Discover are a separate discipline from normal SEO, with their own eligibility rules. Get the structure wrong and you simply never appear, no matter how good the writing is.

What I did

Built the /tech-news section to the Google News spec: NewsArticle JSON-LD with Analysis, Opinion, and Reportage subtypes, plus a news:news sitemap in the correct namespace.
Shipped RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds and registered the publication in Google Publisher Center (publication ID on record).
Worked the Discover eligibility checklist (original reporting, no aggregation, clean author and date signals) so the section stays eligible instead of silently dropping out.
Redesigned the newsroom to a Reuters-style layout over four iterations, then fixed the hero-image crop and wrote image rules into the repo so it can't regress.

The result

A live newsroom that is structurally eligible for the Google News carousel and Discover, with feeds and schema that AI answer engines can also read and cite.

The judgment call: what the AI couldn't do

By the numbers

Google News publication (live)

NewsArticle schema types

syndicated feeds

See it

Proof

Verify: View-source the NewsArticle schema and the news sitemap.

Take it with you

News-SEO / Discover research (PNG)Download ↓

← Previous

A self-maintaining SEO/GEO stack

One publish, six platforms