Unlocking Google Discover Code – Analyzing 200+ Million Articles Featuring John Shehata

Garrett: Welcome back to The Next Chapter of Search, hosted by SEO Week and iPullRank. My name’s Garrett Sussman. And if you have not already bought your tickets, we’re talking the end of April in New York City, the 28th to May 1st, four days of action-packed presentations from 35+ amazing, like the best of the best, cream of the crop speakers from all over the world. We’re talking AI, data, local, news, e-commerce, SEO, content, you name it, everything is being covered. And I’m so excited today. I’m joined by one of the amazing experts in news in Google Discover. I’m joined today by John Shehata, who is the founder and CEO at NewzDash. Thank you so much for joining me today, John. How you doing, man?

John: Oh, all good. Thanks so much for having me, Garrett. I think this is the first time we meet on camera, I guess, right? But I can’t wait actually for SEO Week to meet in person. So almost there, a few weeks.

Garrett: You are prolific. You’ve been doing Nest for so long, you are plugged into everything news in our industry, everything SEO. NewzDash is such a fantastic, very specific tool. It’s wild that you’re running it all, you know, like when you’re kind of running all over the place doing all the things, but let’s dive in. The current state of search, the last 12 months, 24 months have been wild across general SEO, but even specifically in news. A lot of publishers dealing with a lot of challenges. I mean, they’ve been dealing with kind of business model challenges for years now. What’s your perspective on the state of search?

John: I think we’re in a pivotal moment of search. It reminds me, like I’m a little bit old school, like almost like doing this for 25 years now. Like the old days was the Florida updates and like all the big, big, monumental things that happened In search. I think now we’re at a moment where Google is the evolution of Google, right? Not just Google, AI in general, right? So, you see AI overview in Google, you see AI mode, you see people, more and more people are using like chat GPT, not only for like, you know, tasks, but actually for doing search. So, there is a whole new frontier ahead of us, right?

So, I think SEO, it’s evolving in a whole different state right now. So, I’m very excited about that actually in a big way. I see more and more challenges to news publishers or publishers overall, right? Less traffic is coming from Google, right? Discover is sending them a ton of traffic, but it’s very hard to understand why or why they lose it. And then you see that not a lot of publishers still have reliable sources of revenue, right? Many of them still relying on like display, some of them a lot, few of them start like figure out the whole like subscription model and stuff like this. So I think it’s going to be a little bit shaky for many publishers going forward.

So, these are, I think the two big things, right? And I think brand authority is a topic that we don’t talk a lot about, but I think like we need to go beyond like keywords and links and stuff like this. And I think about brand authority, and I know brand talks a lot about brand authority and zero click marketing. So, these are where we are right now. AI, AI overviews, Google evolution, right? Discover, more revenue sources, and what did we say? Brand authority.

Garrett: I love it. And especially for like news publishers, when you’re talking to AI overviews, there’s also this whole like copyright IP issue, you know, like whether it’s in Google or, you know, New York Times is sued against ChatGPT, like how are they supposed to navigate that?

John: It’s crazy. Like when AI first came, it was obvious that Google didn’t want to get into the sensitive areas of content, but now more and more, I see like, I think I did the test a few months ago, and you can search for news and Google will tell you, “oh, this is what happened a few hours ago,” right? So, there’s a whole different frontier. Also ChatGPT, I shared this on LinkedIn the other day. I said, “what happened, what are the top news today?” Boom, boom, boom, boom, give you all the important news. What are the most important news in Europe? What are the most important news in sports? Can you tell me what happened with that Zelensky Trump situation? And it gives you like a quick brief as if like you don’t have to read a hundred other articles, right? And it links to other sources and so on. So, there is definitely copyright IP issue here.

Some publishers have direct agreements with ChatGPT and others, right? But still very few, right? Like in comparison to all the different publishers out there. It’s going to be very interesting, especially with content summarization around news. Because we are at a time where people read less and less and we need things very quick, right? Especially with new generations, as well. So, it’s going to be very interesting how news is going to be shifting to get to this like a very short attention span.

Garrett: It’s tough. I mean, journalism is such a difficult industry to begin with. It’s taken beat downs across the way. So, what I’m really excited about with your presentation is you’re going to get into a lot of the data of Discover. Can you kind of give a preview of what you’re going to be covering at SEO Week and why people should catch your presentation?

John: Sure, absolutely. So, I don’t know, something that not a lot of people know, I was the second site on Google Discover when it first started in 2018. And back then it was actually the, Google came to us and called the Nest and Google Discover back then used to be powered by RSS feeds. So that was fun. So, I love Google Discover. I love Google Discover because it’s like this amazing area between search and social, right? It’s like the right mix between the things and it’s sending publishers a ton of traffic.

Like you can see, we have so many publishers as part of our different tools. And we can see, we did a study for between 2023 and 2024. And we see that Google Discover traffic as from the Google Pi increased from like 40 something to 66%, right? Of all Google traffic that comes to news publishers, 66. I have seen 90% of some publishers, right? And then search on the other hand dropped from like 45-50 to 35-36, right? So, Google Discover is huge. And if you speak to Google, it’s like, oh, there is no way to optimize for that, right? It’s highly personalized, everything is personalized. While this is accurate, there’s still many, many ways that you can understand why you’re getting this traffic. And then you can optimize against that. You’re not optimizing against each individual user but against your content characteristics.

So, I dug down like 170, 180 million articles, right? And we start like seeing all these different patterns that emerge, right? So, I’m trying in SEO Week, I’m going to be talking about the path. Actually, I’m going to talk about 11 different ways that you can optimize for Google Discover. And 11 ways that you can lose your Google Discover traffic. So, it’s going to be interesting. It’s all supported by data. So hopefully like just sharing as much knowledge as possible because Google Discover is still a very much a black box.

Garrett: Oh my goodness, it is. I’m so excited for it. I’m so curious. Give us a taste. What’s like one practical thing that you can give away right now that someone can do to improve their Google Discover traffic?

John: Absolutely. Let me think of a good one. Want to keep them for the conference, but okay. Okay, syndication. All right, so a lot of times like we will have clients, let’s say they write about technology in France, okay? And one of the tools that we have, NewzDash, is like we provide them what’s doing very well in technology in US. And if they have the authority on that topic in their own language and their own country, and they take articles from other countries that are doing very well and write it, repurpose it, republish it, most of the time it works for them.

So, you can get inspiration from so many different ways, not only what’s trending in your market, but you can actually take inspiration from like bigger, other countries that this vertical might be like bigger or like has more content around it. And that actually helps a lot. We see a success rate of like 70+ percent for this kind of like content translation or adaption from one language to another.

Garrett: That’s such an interesting approach. And it does make a ton of sense, especially content syndication is always something like, it feels like a taboo thing to talk about, and yet it’s so like critical to the journalism industry. So, what’s next? What do you think is going to happen with publishing and Google and SEO over the next few years? What do you predict?

John: I think we are at a transition stage with SEO. And I think SEO was after AI or 2025 and beyond will be greatly different from what we used to do, right? We kept saying, talking about like entities for a long, long time. I think keywords is becoming more and more obsolete. It’s more focused on entities. I think SEOs need to learn more about AI. I’m not saying everyone needs to be a technical wizard like Mike King, but definitely like, you need to understand the concepts. You need to understand how AI is influenced. How is it influenced by what sources, right? You need to understand a lot of that, right?

I think AI agents for SEO will be a huge thing. We’re looking into different ways of doing this, but imagine the amount, the time you can save on all these mandate jobs. I think editorial teams will slowly adapt to the idea of having AI as one of their power tools in the newsroom. I’m not saying like they’re going to use it to write complete articles, but you can use it for research and summarizations and so many other things to make the whole thing efficient. I think these are some of the things I personally are excited about, but definitely SEO will be different 2025 going forward.

Garrett: I agree. You got my head exploding because I’m thinking about the agentic AI of like, something as simple as curating your own newsfeed more effectively with an up-to-date agent or something like, I know when you’re talking to key sources like being able to extract subject matter expert quotes with AI more effectively as a journalist. So much you can do.

I’m so excited, John. I’m excited to chat with you like face-to-face. We’ll get a chance to talk about all this stuff. It’s going to be great. So, if you haven’t already gotten your tickets for SEO Week, you can get it at seoweek.org. Check us out. We’ll be there in New York at the end of April. John, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been fantastic.

John: Thank you so much for having me. Can’t wait to see you guys.

Garrett: See you guys.