Google’s open job listings outline new strategies to generate and recommend AI content in Discover.
New job listings from Google suggest it is looking for staff to generate and recommend AI content for Discover.
An open machine learning engineer position on the tech giant’s career site outlined that the ‘discover feed recommendation’ team “leads by recommending AI-generated content (AIGC) to fulfill user interests”.
Google Discover is an important part of SEO for publishers, serving as a queryless, personalised content feed on mobile devices through the Google app and when user’s open a new tab on Chrome.
Another job listing specified Google is searching for a director-level design leader to turn Discover into a “proactive, hyper-personalised concierge experience”.
This role, the job description said, would work with teams at Chrome, Android, YouTube, and shopping to help scale AI-enable formats in the Discover feed. The listing expressed Google’s desire to “balance AI capabilities while centring human voices and sources”.
The engineer role listing also stipulated the successful candidate will “build the agentic loops and evaluation frameworks needed to ensure factuality, freshness, coherence, and tone for AI-generated content that empowers users across Google’s proactive surfaces like Discover and notifications”.
What this means
Google bolstering its design and machine learning teams is no great shock in itself, but the Discover-focused development does have relevance for publishers and site-owners.
The Alphabet-owned firm described Discover as one of the largest feed-based products in the world, with over 500 million daily active users. The new team is likely to take ownership of the user-facing part of the feed, and will be tasked with integrating AI into the feed itself.
This means Discover could begin to mirror the AI Overviews and AI Mode features within Google’s search, with AI summarising, explaining, or even redirecting users away from publisher sites.
When an AI Mode is present in a Google search, that search ends without a click-through to a publisher 93% of the time, Semrush data revealed. For Discover users, or any publisher who wants to get their content found through Discover, this could mean the push to integrate AI into the feed might push their content to the sidelines, or result in a decline in click-through rates to their sites.
