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
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Google News publication (live)
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NewsArticle schema types
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syndicated feeds
See it
Proof
Verify: View-source the NewsArticle schema and the news sitemap.
Take it with you
