Google Discover profiles expand as follow-based recommendations grow

Discover is becoming a followable surface, not just a recommendation feed

Google Discover is starting to look a lot less like a passive swipe-through and a lot more like a place where publishers and creators can build something closer to an audience relationship. Google said in September 2025 that Discover would surface more kinds of content from publishers and creators, including posts from X, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, and that users could follow publishers or creators directly inside Discover after previewing a dedicated content space by tapping the source name.

That shift matters because it changes the job from simply getting a story into a feed to making the brand itself recognizable enough that people want to follow it. In practical terms, Discover is no longer just judging the appeal of a single article. It is increasingly judging the strength of the source behind the article.

Why entity signals now carry so much weight

The profile rollout makes more sense when you look at how Google has built this stack over time. Google’s Knowledge Graph launched in 2012, and by 2020 Google said it had grown to more than 500 billion facts about five billion entities. Google also says knowledge panels are generated automatically from that graph and can include links to official websites and social profiles.

That is the real backdrop for Discover profiles: Google is not just trying to understand pages, it is trying to understand entities. A publisher with clean identity signals, consistent social links, and a stable brand footprint is easier for Google to classify, surface, and trust. If your brand looks fragmented across the web, you are making that job harder.

Discover has always leaned on interests, not just keywords

This is not a brand-new system. When Google introduced Discover in 2018, it said the feed was already reaching more than 800 million people each month. It also said Discover uses the Topic Layer in the Knowledge Graph, which helps Google predict a user’s expertise and interests.

That detail is easy to miss, but it explains why Discover traffic often behaves so differently from search traffic. A story can perform well because it aligns with a user’s ongoing interests, not because it is the cleanest keyword match. The feed has always mixed personalization, topical understanding, and freshness, so the current profile expansion is really the latest step in a longer evolution.

What changed in September 2025

Google’s September 2025 update pushed Discover further toward direct follows. Users were told they could follow publishers and creators directly in Discover, and the feed would also broaden the range of content it shows. That included social-first material from X, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, which makes Discover feel more like a blended content hub than a traditional news module.

That broader mix changes the competitive field. A publisher is no longer only competing against other articles. It is competing against creator posts, short-form video, and social content that can all occupy the same attention window. The source identity, not just the asset format, becomes part of the pitch.

How the current profile rollout appears to work

A May 2026 report from Search Engine Land gives the clearest sign yet that Google is testing a more controlled, profile-centric version of Discover. The report says Google gave 54 publishers access to enhanced Discover profiles, and that those publishers were identified by monitoring 46,926 publishers. It also says all 54 were U.S.-based and English-language.

The important part is not just the number. It is the difference between enhanced profiles and standard profiles. According to that report, enhanced profiles can include custom banner images, configurable links, and the ability to pin posts. Standard profiles, by contrast, are auto-generated and may pull social links from the Knowledge Graph.

That distinction tells you a lot about where Google may be heading. Some publishers are being given a limited amount of control over how they present themselves inside Discover, while the broader population still gets an automated version built from Google’s own entity data.

What agencies and publishers should do now

The old reflex was to think about Discover as a traffic bonus attached to SEO. That is too narrow now. If Discover is becoming a follow-based distribution surface, then brand architecture, social proof, and entity hygiene all become part of the work.

• Keep publisher and author names consistent across site, social, and structured data.
• Make official social profiles easy for Google to connect to the brand entity.
• Treat the publication homepage, author pages, and about pages as identity signals, not just boilerplate.
• Publish with enough cadence and topical coherence that Google can clearly classify what the brand covers.
• Separate Discover performance from classic search performance in reporting, because the mechanics are different.

This is where a lot of agencies still get lazy. They obsess over rankings and forget that a feed environment rewards recognizable sources, not just well-optimized pages. If Google is using entity signals to decide whether a source deserves a profile or a follow, then weak brand consistency becomes a real visibility problem.

Why analytics needs a different lens

Google’s Discover documentation says the feed is based on a user’s Web and App Activity, and that Discover traffic can change over time. That means the channel is inherently more volatile than search and more sensitive to shifting user behavior, topic interest, and feed composition.

For teams reporting to clients, that volatility matters. A Discover hit can spike hard and fade fast, and that does not automatically mean the underlying SEO is broken. It means the channel is behaving the way Google designed it to behave: interest-led, personalized, and subject to change as the user’s activity shifts.

The smarter move is to stop treating Discover as a side effect of ranking and start treating it as a distribution system with its own rules. The brands that win here will be the ones that look like real entities to Google, feel like real destinations to users, and have enough identity signal for a follow button to make sense.