NewzDash published an analysis comparing Discover visibility before and after Google’s February 2026 Discover core update, using panel data from millions of US users tracked through its DiscoverPulse tool.
It compared pre-update (Jan 25-31) and post-update (Feb 8-14) windows across the top 1,000 domains and top 1,000 articles in the US, California, and New York.
For transparency, NewzDash is a news SEO tracking platform that sells Discover monitoring tools.
What The Data Shows
Google said the update targeted more locally relevant content, less sensational and clickbait content, and more in-depth, timely content from sites with topic expertise. The NewzDash data has early readings on all three.
NewzDash compared Discover feeds in California, New York, and the US as a whole. The three feeds mostly overlapped, but each state got local stories the others didn’t. New York-local domains appeared roughly five times more often in the New York feed than in the California feed, and vice versa.
In California, local articles in the top 100 placements rose from 10 to 16 in the post-update window. The local layer included content from publishers like SFGate and LA Times that didn’t appear in the national top 100 during the same period.
Clickbait reduction was harder to confirm. NewzDash acknowledged that headline markers alone can’t prove clickbait decreased. It did find that what it called ‘templated curiosity-gap patterns’ appeared to lose visibility. Yahoo’s presence in the US top 1,000 dropped from 11 to 6 articles, with zero items in the top 100 post-update.
Unique content categories grew across all three geographic views, but unique publishers shrank in the US (172 to 158 domains) and California (187 to 177). That combination suggests Discover is covering more topics but sending that distribution to a narrower set of publishers.
This pattern aligns with what early December core update analysis showed about specialized sites gaining ground over generalists.
X.com’s Growing Discover Presence
X.com posts from institutional accounts climbed from 3 to 13 items in the US top 100 Discover placements and from 2 to 14 in New York’s top 100.
NewzDash noted it had tracked X.com’s Discover growth since November and said the update appeared to accelerate the trend. Most top-performing X items came from established media brands.
The analysis noted it couldn’t prove or disprove whether X posts are cannibalizing publisher traffic in Discover, calling the data a “directional sanity check.” The open question is whether routing through X adds friction that could reduce click-through to owned pages.
Why This Matters
As we continue to monitor the Discover core update, we now have early data on what it seems to favor. Regional publishers with locally relevant content showed up more often in NewzDash’s post-update top lists.
Discover covered more topics in the post-update window, but fewer sites were getting that traffic in the US and California. Publishers without a clear topic focus could be on the wrong side of that trend.
Looking Ahead
This analysis covers an early window while the rollout is still being completed. The post-update measurement period overlaps with the Super Bowl, Winter Olympics, and ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, any of which could independently inflate News and Sports category visibility.
Google said it plans to expand the Discover core update beyond English-language US users in the months ahead.
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