SEO for AI AgentsSEO for news sites and publishers
News has its own surfaces, Top Stories, Google News, Discover, and its own signals: freshness, datelines, and author authority. The pack gets articles discovered fast, timestamped honestly, and attributed to real journalists, and is honest that inclusion in news surfaces is Google's call.
The Visibility Ladder, tuned
Where sites like this actually fail
Same five rungs, same order, different emphasis. Diagnose top to bottom, fix bottom to top.
Speed of crawling and indexing matters more than usual because news is time-sensitive. Fresh sitemaps, plus a Google News sitemap for recent articles, and no client-rendered article bodies.
A real headline, byline, and dateline with visible publish and update timestamps. Clear titles that match the story, not clickbait.
NewsArticle schema with true dates, a real Person author and a publisher Organization with logo. Paywalled sections marked up correctly so they're indexed without being treated as cloaking.
Strong section and topic hubs, linked follow-up coverage, and canonicals for syndicated stories pointing to the originator.
E-E-A-T is paramount for news: credentialled journalists, sourcing, a corrections policy, and editorial standards pages. Recency counts, and timestamps stay honest.
News is heavily surfaced by AI answers. Clear, factual, self-contained reporting with honest attribution is highly citable.
Priority tilt: Weight Reach (fast indexing), Understand (NewsArticle and timestamps), and Rank (E-E-A-T and recency) highest.
Checks specific to this kind of site
Google News sitemap
A dedicated sitemap for articles from the last two days, kept current, so new stories are discovered fast.
Honest timestamps
Accurate, visible published and modified dates. Date-bumping to fake freshness is flagged, never performed.
Paywall markup
isAccessibleForFree and hasPart markup so subscriber content is indexed legitimately rather than looking like cloaking.
Syndication canonicals
Wire and syndicated stories canonicalise to the originator so republished copies don't compete.
The honest news boundary
Google News and Publisher Center inclusion, and Top Stories or Discover placement, are Google's editorial and algorithmic decisions. Done right, you're eligible; nothing makes you guaranteed. Reputation for a news brand is also heavily earned off-site, outside what a build controls. The pack makes that boundary explicit from the start.
Skills that do the work
- seo-orchestratorApplies the news-publisher profile (combined with content-blog fundamentals)
- 3-understand-schemaNewsArticle, author, publisher, and paywall markup, all honest
- 5-rank-relevanceE-E-A-T signals: bylines, sourcing, corrections, and editorial standards
- seo-automationsCI checks so a deploy never silently breaks article rendering or sitemaps
Driven by the news-publisher profile in the pack.
Structured data it works with
- NewsArticle
- Person (real journalists)
- Organization + logo
- BreadcrumbList
Always honest: markup describes only what's real and visible on the page. Fabricated ratings, authors, or credentials are removed and flagged, never added.
Try it on your site
Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor, or any AI coding agent. It's read-only: the agent audits and reports, and changes nothing until you ask.
Use the seo-for-ai-agents skill pack (https://github.com/manibharij/seo-for-ai-agents) with the news-publisher profile: audit my news site on the served HTML. Check article bodies render server-side, verify NewsArticle schema and timestamp honesty, review the news sitemap, and assess byline and E-E-A-T signals. Report only, don't change any code or files yet.
Common questions
Will this get my site into Google News or Top Stories?
It makes you eligible, which is all anything can honestly do. Top Stories and Google News inclusion are policy-gated, algorithmic decisions by Google. The pack gets the technical and trust fundamentals right: fast discovery, valid NewsArticle schema, honest timestamps, and real author signals, and is explicit that placement is not guaranteed.
Can I update an article's date to make it look fresh?
No, and the pack won't do it. Date-bumping without a real update is dishonest markup that engines increasingly detect and punish. If a story genuinely changes, update the content and let dateModified reflect it truthfully; that's the freshness signal that works.
How should paywalled articles be handled?
With proper structured data: mark the article isAccessibleForFree: false and identify the paywalled sections with hasPart markup. That lets Google index subscriber content legitimately. Serving crawlers the full text while showing users a wall without that markup is treated as cloaking.