What are the Top Stories?
The Top Stories feature is displayed as a block of cards featuring trending topics or breaking news that align with the user’s search query.
It usually appears in the upper half of the first results page. Each card includes a small but representative image or video preview from the featured article, along with the publisher's name and timestamps.
Top Stories on Desktop
Top Stories on Mobile
How do you track Top Stories using Advanced Web Ranking?
In Advanced Web Ranking, you can track the Top Stories results using the Google Universal search engine: Google Desktop Universal for desktop searches and Google Mobile Universal for mobile search results.
You can add these search engines for monitoring from the Project Settings > Search Engines section.
When monitoring a Universal search engine, the positions of Organic entries alongside the URLs from Top Stories, Local 3-pack, Featured Snippets, People Also Ask, Images, and other types of results will be reported as ranking if found in the SERPs retrieved from Google. More information on Google's search preferences available in AWR can be found in this article here.
How are the Top Stories reported in AWR?
When found in the SERPs retrieved from Google, the articles featured within the Top Stories block along with their links are reported on the same ranking position since they’re part of the same search result element.
How can you identify the keywords that trigger Top Stories with AWR?
You can easily identify the keywords that have triggered a Top Stories result and track their performance in SERPs by using the SERP Features filter within the Ranking>Keywords report.
In the filtered results, the SERP Features column shows which features are present on the search results pages retrieved from Google for each keyword, making it simple for you to spot the presence of “Top Stories” and other types of results.
If the selected website (main or competitor's URL) ranks for a particular SERP Feature, the associated feature symbol is highlighted in green. If the selected website doesn’t secure any of the features present in SERP, all the symbols will remain blue.
While on search results pages, users can click the "More news" button to view additional articles in the News section, in Advanced Web Ranking only the URLs immediately visible within the Top Stories block are tracked and reported as ranking.
How can your website get featured in Top Stories?
Securing a spot in Google’s Top Stories feature can be challenging, especially since the content displayed is time-sensitive and predominantly pulled from trusted news portals, communities, and authoritative blogs who can publish reliable and trustworthy content quickly.
Top Stories are less common for niche topics, making them less relevant for websites that don’t focus on publishing news. However, their eye-catching design and prominent placement often lead to high CTRs. Even if your business isn’t centered around news or trends, it’s still important to be aware of their presence on SERPs.
As a small business, you can increase your chances of appearing in Top Stories by creating timely content on relevant topics and optimizing it to rank on the first page of search results. Here’s how:
Track current trends or anticipate upcoming events in your industry, and produce unique, valuable content that aligns with Google News content policies.
Strategically incorporate relevant keywords into your headlines, body text, title tags, and meta descriptions to improve discoverability.
Ensure your content is well-structured with HTML tags to enhance readability and user experience.
Implement schema.org NewsArticle markup to help Google understand and display your content in the Top Stories carousel.
Measure and optimize Core Web Vitals (CWV) metrics, as Google prioritizes pages with excellent CWV performance for Top Stories and News rankings.
Do you have any other questions? Don’t hesitate to get in touch and we will keep building the FAQ.