Last month we reported that Google News Publisher Center changes are coming, well those changes should have happened and been fully completed by today. Google updated its help document on the topic to say “Google News is fully transitioning to automatically generated publication pages in late March 2025.”
Late March is now and the transition should be complete.
In fact, that help document page was significantly updated, so those who do SEO for news publishers are a news publisher themselves, should review it.
Here is what has changed or what is new:
Following our announcement in April 2024 last year, Google News is fully transitioning to automatically generated publication pages in late March 2025. This change seeks to improve our existing publisher workflow and simplify our current product experience.
To achieve this, all publication pages in Google News will be generated automatically. Google News will no longer use RSS feeds or web locations that were submitted in Publisher Center. As a result, publication pages that were created by publishers manually will no longer appear to users in Google News. Some publications may not have an automatically-generated landing page.
Gogole also updated this section:
Publisher Center will also discontinue nonessential customization features for publication pages in Google News, and the Google News tile will no longer appear in Publisher Center.
Google also added three new sections to this document:
(1) Global distribution settings
By default, links to your content in Google News are available to users worldwide. To streamline publisher setup, starting next month, publishers will no longer be able to use Publisher Center to restrict their content from appearing in certain countries, with the exception of News Showcase panels. Users will find content in Google News according to their language and region preferences. Learn how to check or change your Google News settings.
News Showcase publishers will be able to use Publisher Center to allow or block users in specific countries from seeing News Showcase panels.
(2) Text-to-speech distribution options on Google Assistant
News content on the web may be used in Google Assistant’s text-to-speech feature to respond to user queries about a specific news topic (example: “Play news about bitcoin”) within the US. The Assistant topical news feature where snippets of an article are played on speakers via Text to Speech will be discontinued outside the US soon, and the opt-out settings for use within the US are changing. To block your content from being part of this user experience, you can use the nopagereadaloud HTML meta tag on your website. For more information, refer to our Help Center article: Google Read Aloud user agent.
(3) Video news on Google News and Google Assistant
Similarly, publishers will no longer be able to use Publisher Center to submit YouTube content for consideration in Google News or Google Assistant. As a reminder, publishers can continue sharing their video content on YouTube. YouTube content is also automatically considered for Google Assistant.
So make sure to read the updated help document.
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