Google Discover needs no tags, no badge and no profile — and Google’s new follow button is US-only

The short version

• Google has added a follow mechanic to Search. A “Search profile” gathers your content from across platforms into one page people can follow, and following it makes your content more likely to appear in their Discover feed.
• It is United-States-only and needs 10,000 followers on YouTube, Instagram, X or TikTok. Those rules are on a different page from the developer guide.
• ⚠️ The developer guide never mentions either limit. We counted: “United States”, “follower”, “subscriber”, “10,000”, “eligib” and “availab” appear zero times each.
• Discover eligibility itself needs nothing. Google’s own words: content is automatically eligible if it is indexed and meets the policies, and no special tags or structured data are required.
• One technical setting does matter — max-image-preview:large, which controls whether Google may show your image big.
• 🚩 We checked every page of our own site, twice, two days apart. Not one of 110 sets it. That is this article’s embarrassment, and it is ours.
• A second new Google page lists search features by region — the EEA, South Africa and Türkiye. The UK is named nowhere in it.

What Google published, and what it is

Google Search Central’s documentation-updates feed records, under 16 September: “Added documentation on adding a Search profile badge to your website”. The new guide explains the idea in one paragraph:

“A Search profile brings together your content from across the web and social platforms into a single destination on Google. When readers follow your Search profile, it makes your content that’s linked on your Search profile (such as your content on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Facebook, and your website) more likely to appear for your audience on Google Discover”.

Read that again, because it is a bigger change than the wording suggests. Search has had ranking for twenty-five years and no subscription. This is a follow button: an audience that opts in once and then keeps seeing you, in a feed, without searching for anything. For anyone who has watched organic reach on social platforms rise and then be withdrawn, the shape will be familiar.

The badge itself is trivial — a link round an image, pointing at https://profile.google.com/@handle. The guide gives the snippet, tells you to “Download the Search profile badge assets and follow brand guidelines”, and adds sensible housekeeping: keep the clickable target “at least 48 × 48 dp on Android and 44 × 44 px on iOS and web”, and the brand rules ask you not to stretch, distort, rotate or recolour the Super G icon (paraphrased here rather than quoted, because the source’s own sentence carries nested quotation marks).

⚠️ Google writes “colors” and we have left the spelling as published, here and throughout.

The part the guide leaves out

The guide opens its instructions with the words “After you’ve claimed your Search profile”, linked to a help page. That help page is where the conditions live, and they are severe:

“Important: Search profiles are currently only available in the United States.”

And then:

“You must have a minimum number of subscribers or followers on at least one content platform: YouTube: 10,000 Instagram: 10,000 X: 10,000 TikTok: 10,000”

Plus “You must be at least 18 years old.” The help page is written for creators throughout, and that is worth noting: we could not find anything stating how the follower thresholds are meant to apply to a business rather than a person.

Now the bit we counted. We fetched the developer guide, stripped the tags and searched its text. The words “United States”, “follower”, “subscriber”, “10,000”, “eligib” and “availab” occur zero times each. The single appearance of “region” anywhere on the page is an unrelated navigation link about multi-regional sites.

So a UK site owner can read the whole guide, follow all three steps, paste the snippet, and end up with a badge linking to a profile they are not permitted to create. Nothing in the document warns them. It is not deception — the link is right there in the first sentence — but it is a developer page written as though everyone reading it is already eligible.

Which is a pattern, not an accident

Eight days earlier, on 8 September, Google updated a second page: a list of which search features exist where. It opens by explaining that “Google is evolving the search results page for certain types of queries to provide new opportunities for Vertical Search Services (VSS), Comparison Shopping Services (CSS), direct suppliers, and content providers”, then offers a selector: “To find the features relevant to your website, select where your company is based” — with three choices. The EEA, South Africa and Türkiye.

The features listed are substantial: aggregator units and supplier units for hotels, flights, ground transportation, local businesses, and products; an ecosystem carousel for weather, sports, finance and translate; dedicated job-sites and places-sites carousels; structured-data carousels.

⚠️ That list grew while this article was being written, and the addition is the most relevant word in it. When we first read the page on 17 September those two rows said “Hotels, flights, ground transportation, and products”. Re-fetching on the morning of publication, both now read “Hotels, flights, ground transportation, local businesses, and products” — Google’s documentation-updates feed records the change on 18 September as “Added local business query support to the aggregator and supplier units”. So the EEA feature set has just reached the query type an ordinary small business actually lives on. We are reporting both readings rather than quietly publishing the newer one.

“United Kingdom” appears nowhere on the page. We checked the body text; the count is zero. We are stating a fact about the document and not about Google’s intentions — we have not found any page that says the UK is excluded from these features, and we are not claiming one exists. But if you have ever read a confident European SEO article and wondered why your own results page looks nothing like the screenshots, the bucket the writer was standing in is a reasonable first place to look.

What actually gets you into Discover

Here is the reassuring half, and it is the answer to the question most people are really asking. Google’s Discover documentation is unusually plain:

“Content is automatically eligible to appear in Discover if it is indexed by Google and meets Discover’s content policies. No special tags or structured data are required. Note that being eligible to appear in Discover is not a guarantee of appearing.”

No tags. No badge. No profile. No application. If your pages are indexed and you are not breaking the content policies, you are already eligible, and have been all along. The third sentence is the honest one: eligible is not the same as chosen, and no amount of work makes it a certainty.

The same page recommends the things you would expect of any decent publisher — avoid clickbait, “Use page titles and headlines that capture the essence of the content”, avoid “sensationalism tactics”, and provide content that is “timely for current interests, tells a story well, or provides unique insights”. Sound advice, and not measurable.

The one setting that is measurable — and which we fail

There is exactly one part of Google’s Discover advice you can check with a script, and it is about how big your picture is allowed to be. Google recommends images that are “At least 1200 px wide”, of “High resolution of more than 300,000 total pixels”, in a “16x9 aspect ratio” — and then the clause that does the work:

“Enabled by the max-image-preview:large setting , or by using AMP”

⚠️ The space before the comma is an artefact of a link in Google’s own sentence; we have quoted the fragment as the page renders it.

That is not a picture setting. It is a robots meta tag. You can commission a beautiful 1200-pixel image, reference it correctly, and still have told Google it may only show a thumbnail. The two halves live in completely different parts of your site, which is precisely why one gets done and the other does not.

So we checked ourselves. Every URL in our sitemap, fetched and searched:

Nought out of a hundred and ten. We ran the whole sweep twice, on 17 and 19 September: 109 pages then, 110 now that another post has gone up, and the count of pages carrying the setting was zero both times. We have produced a hand-made 1200×630 image for every post for months, and told Google on every single page that it may not show any of them at full size. A round number like zero usually means the script is broken rather than the world, so we tested the checker three ways before believing it: against a synthetic tag containing the string, against a national news site that does use it, and by reading one of our own pages by hand. The checker is fine. We are not.

And a second, smaller thing while we were measuring: our images are 1200×630, which is 756,000 pixels — comfortably past both the width and the total-pixel recommendations — but that shape is 1.905:1, and 16×9 is 1.778:1. We have been making the standard social-preview rectangle, not the one Google asks for here. That is the same class of mistake as assuming one platform’s image rule is every platform’s, which we wrote about when Google’s 500×500 product-image rule turned out to have two contradictory dates on the same page.

⚠️ We are publishing this before fixing it, deliberately. For new posts the fix is one line in what we write, and it goes in straight after this publishes; retrofitting all 110 existing pages is a separate job and we are not going to pretend it is done — but a post that quietly tidied up first would be worth less to you, and you would have no way of knowing whether the advice had ever been tested.

What to do on Monday

• Check your own robots meta tag for max-image-preview:large. View source on any page and search for it. If it is absent, that is a one-line change and the only measurable Discover item on the list.
• Do not buy a “get into Discover” package. Google says eligibility requires no tags and no structured data. There is nothing to purchase and no queue to join.
• Ignore the Search profile badge for now unless you are a US-based creator with 10,000 followers somewhere. Note it and move on.
• When you read international SEO advice, check which region it was written for. Aggregator units and ecosystem carousels are EEA features and the UK is not in that list.

What argues the other way

US-only is usually temporary. Google’s own wording is “currently only available in the United States”, and the word currently is doing real work. Features of this kind have widened before. Knowing how the badge is installed before you need it costs nothing, which is a perfectly good reason for the guide to exist.

And the follower threshold may not be the whole story. The help page also notes that “If you already have a knowledge panel on Google and meet these requirements, a Search profile might have been automatically generated” — so some entities have profiles waiting to be claimed. That is still gated on the same requirements, but it means the population is not only people who applied.

On our own failure, the honest caveat: we have no evidence that adding the setting will bring us Discover traffic, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Google lists it as a condition of large previews, not as a ranking factor. What we can say is that we were failing a stated, checkable condition on every page while writing regularly about search — and that we found it by reading the documentation rather than by anything cleverer.

Sources, and what we checked

• The badge guide: Add a Search Profile Badge to Your Website, Google Search Central, page’s own last-updated date 16 September 2026, at developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/search-profiles.
• The eligibility rules: Create a new Search profile, Google Search Help, at support.google.com/websearch/answer/16904498 — the page the guide itself links to.
• The regional list: Regional differences in Search experience, last-updated date 8 September 2026, at developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/aggregator-features.
• The Discover guidance: Google Discover and your website, Google Search Central.
• All four fetched raw and tag-stripped on 17 September and again on the morning of publication; every quotation asserted present in the stripped text, and the zero-occurrence counts re-run on the second fetch. The two developer pages came back identical to the character both times; the help page differed by a single character, which turned out to be a session identifier inside Google’s own page furniture.
• The page count is ours — every URL in our sitemap, fetched and searched for the string, run in full on 17 September (109 pages) and again on 19 September (110), with the checker validated against a positive control before we believed the zero.

The image at the top of this page was generated by AI.