Google Discover Optimizations: What if you just needed to update a couple of HTML tags to get more traffic to your site?

I’m Matteo Arellano, and I work on technical SEO, analytics, and organic growth systems. I like this topic because it looks small at first. It is only a robots meta tag in the page head. But once you connect it with Google Discover, featured snippets, AI search previews, image quality, and Search Console data, it becomes a very practical example of how web development decisions can influence real traffic.

Large publishing companies and global newspaper sites know this very well. They are trying to capture mobile-native traffic into their site through Google Discover. If you have an Android and swipe left on the first home page unblocked screen, you'll discover a bunch of articles, sites, even "Sponsored" articles and offers that are personalized by Google to you based on your search behavior. That's called Google Discover and it is important that you understand the positive impact that few code additions into your site can do to increase visibility and click through rates. Google recommends content through Discover, shows answers through featured snippets, generates previews from page content, and increasingly gives users enough context before they decide whether a click is worth it.

This is why the following line is more interesting than it looks:

<meta name="robots" content="max-image-preview:large, max-snippet:-1, max-video-preview:-1">

This tag helps website owners increase their page visibility through Google Discover feeds. It has a very specific purpose, but combined with good and targeted content, it can perform very well on sites. It tells Google how much of your page it is allowed to preview when your page appears across Search surfaces. For a publisher, a blog, or a business writing educational content, that matters because the preview is often what decides whether the user notices the article in the first place.

First, what is Google Discover?

As aforementioned above, Google Discover is a personalized content feed. Instead of waiting for the user to type a query, Google shows articles, videos, and stories based on what it believes the person may be interested in. A reader might open the Google app and see content about energy markets, finance, football, travel, SEO, nutrition, local news, or technology without having searched for that exact article.

The articles displayed on Google Discover do not only on traditional keyword ranking; rather, they show up whenever Google thinks the content matches the interests of the user. Therefore, clear headlines, strong and visually appealing images are important.

68%

of Google traffic to nearly 2,000 global news and media sites came from Discover, according to Chartbeat data published by Press Gazette and later summarized by industry sources.

32%

came from traditional Google Search in the same dataset, which shows why Discover can no longer be treated as a small side channel for publishers.

17%

of total publisher traffic in that dataset came from Discover, compared with 8% from Google Search.

Those numbers are important because they show the strategic risk. If a large part of your Google traffic comes from Discover, then image previews, feed suitability, headline quality, and technical preview permissions are not minor details. They sit directly inside the traffic model of the website.

The tag that matters most for Google Discover

Listen, let me summarize the one thing you must remember. For your pages, use max-image-preview:large. It tells Google that a larger image preview may be shown for the page. Google says this setting applies across Search surfaces such as Google web search, Google Images, Discover, and Assistant, and its Discover documentation specifically says that large images should be enabled by setting preview images to large or by AMP.

If you look at the image below, which one are you most likely to click on? The one showing a desert or the one showing a small car just below it?

Google also gives practical image requirements for Discover: the image should be at least 1200 pixels wide, have more than 300,000 total pixels, and work well in a 16:9 landscape format. That means the technical tag alone is not enough. If your page allows large previews but the article image is small, generic, badly cropped, or unrelated to the topic, you are solving only half of the problem.

This is where technical SEO and editorial judgement meet. A post about electricity markets should not rely on a random light bulb image. A post about featured snippets should show a real search result or a clear visual of the snippet itself. A post about Google Discover should show what a Discover card looks like, because the reader immediately understands why the image preview matters.

There is real evidence behind this tag

The reason I would not treat max-image-preview:large as a theoretical detail is that Google has published case studies showing measurable changes after publishers adopted large image preview settings. Kirbie’s Cravings, a food blog, reported a 79% increase in click-through rate from Discover after adding the tag. Istoé, a Brazilian magazine, reported a 30% increase in CTR and a 332% increase in clicks over six months after adopting the large image preview setting.

I would still be careful with the interpretation. These results do not mean every website will see the same lift, and they do not prove that the tag alone caused every extra click. But they do show that image preview settings can be commercially meaningful when the site already publishes content that can perform in Discover.

What max-snippet:-1 means

The second directive is max-snippet:-1. A snippet is the text preview Google shows below a result, and Google explains that snippets are primarily created from page content, although the meta description may be used when it gives users a better summary. The max-snippet directive lets you control the maximum number of characters Google can show as a text preview.

The value -1 means you are not setting a fixed character limit. In plain language, you are allowing Google to choose the snippet length it believes will help users understand the page and decide whether to visit it. This is usually the sensible default for educational articles, technical guides, and thought leadership content because the preview needs enough room to communicate value.

But this is where the decision becomes more strategic. A longer snippet can improve trust before the click, but it can also answer enough of the user’s question directly on the results page. That is the same tension publishers are feeling with featured snippets, AI Overviews, and AI Mode: Google can make content more visible while also reducing the need to visit the original page.

However, I want to warn about something that is happening. Featured snippets are slowly being replaced by AI Overviews in Google. This is not necessarily positive for websites that had really strong definitions, clear language and useful answers to users. Google is just "taking" those strong, high-traffic results and blending them in into Google AI Overviews.

However, max-snippet is still relevant because it controls how much text Google is allowed to use for search result snippets and AI-style previews, not only old Featured Snippets. If, for your business makes more sense to limit and reduce the chance of appearing in featured snippets, Google says you can experiment with lower max-snippet values. For example, this would tell Google that only 80 characters may be shown as the snippet:

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:80">

This is not a clean on-off switch. Google says there is no exact minimum length required for a featured snippet, and a low max-snippet setting does not guarantee removal. If you need a guaranteed block, Google’s stronger option is nosnippet, but that also removes regular snippets, which can hurt how attractive the page looks in search.

How do you configure videos in Google Discover?

You can use max-video-preview:-1 in the head tag of your HTML to control how much of your video you want it to be previewed to users. The value -1 means there is no fixed limit from your side, so Google can decide the preview length when it shows a video snippet.

For a normal written article with no video, this setting may not make much difference. But for tutorials, interviews, product demos, recipes, travel pages, educational videos, or embedded YouTube content, it is useful to avoid accidentally limiting a preview that could make the result more attractive.

I would only use a fixed number if there is a business reason, for example paid video content, licensing restrictions, premium courses, trailers, or content where you do not want Google showing too much before the click.

Why this matters for publishers and blog-style websites

For a small blog, this is a useful technical check. For a publisher, it can become a template-level issue. If the main article layout does not allow large image previews, then thousands of articles may be published with the same limitation. That does not mean every article would have succeeded in Discover, but it means the site is adding friction before the content even has a chance to compete visually.

The bigger problem is dependency. Reuters Institute’s 2026 journalism trends report says publishers expect traffic from search engines to decline by more than 40% over the next three years, and it describes Google Discover as a critical but slightly volatile source of referral traffic. That is exactly why I think this topic deserves attention. Discover can bring traffic, but it is also unpredictable, and publishers do not fully control the feed.

Why this matters for traffic data

Discover traffic behaves differently from normal search traffic. With Search, you can usually connect performance to queries, rankings, impressions, and click-through rate. With Discover, the user did not search for your exact keyword, so the data feels more like feed performance: impressions can rise suddenly, clicks can spike, and the same URL can disappear from the feed without a clear keyword ranking explanation.

That is why I would never analyze Discover traffic together with normal organic search and call it a day. In Search Console, Discover should be reviewed separately when the report is available. You want to look at which pages received impressions, which images were used, whether the headline matched the topic, whether the article was tied to a current interest, and whether the click-through rate changed after image or preview improvements.

A missing preview tag will not explain every traffic problem. Discover performance can be affected by topic fit, content quality, image quality, freshness, site reputation, page experience, and simple volatility. But if the tag is missing, it is one of the easiest technical limitations to fix, and it is worth checking before you start inventing complicated explanations.

What to do today

Make sure you review what's on the head tag across your sites.

Whilst, adding the tags is not a growth strategy by itself, but it is part of the technical foundation that lets a content strategy travel through Search, Discover, images, videos, and snippets. For a blog, that can mean better presentation. For a publisher, it can mean fixing a setting that affects thousands of articles at once.

Sources and further reading

I used Google’s official documentation for the technical definitions and publisher/media sources for the traffic context. The main point is simple: do not guess these tags from SEO folklore. Check what Google says, then connect it with your own Search Console data.

• Google Search Central: Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specifications
• Google Search Central: Get on Discover
• Google Search Central: Featured snippets and your website
• Google Search Central: Control your snippets in search results
• Google Search Central: Image SEO best practices
• Google Search Central: Large images in Discover improved CTR and increased visits to publisher sites
• Press Gazette: Google Discover traffic and news websites in 2025
• Independent Media Association: Google Discover now makes up two-thirds of search traffic
• Reuters Institute: Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2026
• Ignite Visibility: Max image preview and Google Discover traffic