Technical feed requirements

The information in your feed powers your Google News publication.

Improve your feed

For readers to fully engage with your content, provide full articles and media assets. Set up your feed properly to prevent errors, failed approvals, or removals.

To improve your feed:

• Review the feed content guidelines.
• Verify your RSS or Atom feeds to avoid common errors.
  • Before you create your publication, you can validate your feed, follow recommendations, and fix any issues using a feed validation tool.
• Confirm “News” can crawl your feed.

Technical feed specification

We accept both standard RSS and Atom feeds. The Google News feed follows these parameters:

• Update frequency: Each feed is fetched about every 30 minutes, unless WebSub is used to notify Google News of changes. Learn more about update frequency of feed content.
• Size limit: 1 MB per article and 2 MB per feed.
• Readability: Up to 60 new articles per fetch, without including previously read articles.

Tip: To make sure all content is retrieved, do not exceed fetch or file limits.

Article updates

The <guid> tag in RSS, and <id> tag in Atom are required to identify unique articles. We suggest using the article title as the <guid> / <id> tag, since it’s likely to change.

Important: We use the <pubDate> tag to determine whether the article was modified.

When & how to use isPermaLink

If you provide the full URL of your original article in the <guid> / <id> tags, the isPermaLink is optional. If you don't provide the full URL, isPermaLink must be set to false.

Article contents & markup

Although Google News no longer displays the article contents from the feed to users, other Google products like Google Assistant might still use it.

Important: Google News removes:

• <script> tags
• inline styles (<style> tags or style="") attributes

Follow these guidelines:

• To contain the full contents of every article, use <content:encoded>. If you don’t use a <content:encoded> tag, Google News defaults to content in the <description> tag.
• If both <content:encoded> and <description> tags are present in the feed, Google News drops the tag with the least number of characters.
• For <content:encoded>, use the namespace xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/". HTML must be escaped or preferably wrapped in a CDATA section. For example: <content:encoded><![CDATA[<b>This is some HTML text.</b>]]></content:encoded>

Best practices

• Mark up your content with semantically meaningful HTML tags, such as <p>, <h1>, <ul>.
• If possible, avoid <br>.
• Use block-level elements to avoid zero-pixel border issues.
• Avoid smart quotes.
• If a character encoding must be specified, use UTF-8.

Media assets

We recommend that you use Media RSS tags to identify multimedia content in Atom and RSS feeds. Learn more about Media RSS tags.

Important: To use Media RSS, include the namespace. For example: xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/".

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