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The February 2026 Google Discover Core Update from Digital Phablet has fully completed its rollout, taking a little over three weeks. The update began on February 5 and wrapped up on February 27. According to Google’s status update early on the 27th, the deployment was finished by that date. Initially, it was expected to conclude within two weeks, but it extended an extra week.
This update is described as a broad overhaul of the systems that curate articles in Discover. Key changes include efforts to prioritize more localized content for users based on their country, diminish the visibility of sensational or clickbait material, and promote more in-depth, original, and timely articles from authoritative sources.
Google highlighted that the improvements aim to:
– Better showcase locally relevant content to users.
– Reduce the appearance of sensational and clickbaity content.
– Present more original and timely articles from trusted websites with expertise in specific areas, as interpreted by Google’s content understanding systems.
Since the update emphasizes content from local sources, it may affect the traffic for non-US websites that target a US audience. Over time, however, it is expected that these sites will see increased visibility within their own regions.
Also, Google has updated its Discover guidelines to reflect these changes, so content creators and publishers should review those updates for better alignment.
Limited data outside of analysis from sources like Newzdash suggests a shift in the international share of content, with a decline in global reach for some sites based on country-based targeting. Nonetheless, this Discover update is unlikely to influence the ongoing fluctuations observed in Google Search results.
Discussions and observations about the update can be found on various online forums.
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