Earlier this month, the media site Press Gazette reported that now Google "is increasingly prioritising AI summaries, X posts and Youtube videos" on its "Discover" feed (which appears on the leftmost homescreen page of many Android phones and the Google app's homepage). "The changes could be devastating for publishers who rely heavily on Discover for referral traffic. And it looks set to accelerate a global trend of declining traffic to publishers from both Google search and Discover." Xavi Beumala from website analytics platform Marfeel warned in a research update: "Google Discover is no longer a publisher-first surface. It's becoming an AI platform with YouTube and X absorbing real estate that once went to newsrooms..." [They warn later that "This is not a marginal UI experiment. It is a reallocation of feed real estate away from links and toward inline Youtube plays and generated summaries."] Google says it prioritises "helpful, reliable, people-first content". Unlike Google News, there is no requirement that Google Discover showcases bona fide publisher websites. In recent months fake news stories published by fraudulent website publishers have been promoted on Google Discover, reaping tens of millions of clicks. Google said it was working on a "fix" for this issue... Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok content may also start flowing into the Discover feed in future. When Google announced the addition of posts from X, Instagram and Youtube Shorts in September, it said there would be "more platforms to come".

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