What’s happening? Google Discover rolling out a new full width design.
What’s the issue? With new full width design rolling out for Discover feed, I’m noticing some featured images getting too much stretched out on user devices and becoming blurry (might impact CTR 🙃).
Like for this one ….. image in the Discover feed is weird and blurry compared to what it is on that page.
Per Google’s technical guidelines for Discover images
“Large images need to be at least 1200 px wide and enabled by the max-image-preview:large setting, or by using AMP. Avoid using a site logo as your image.” But even if you are following these still images might look messy in the feeds of users.
How publishers can measure the impact of this change on their Discover traffic?
This change started to roll out on 3rd April, if your noticing decline in CTR in Search Console Discover performance report then probably it might be related to this change.
What publishers can do if because of this change Discover traffic dropping?
For now I’m not sure what exact technical details of images would be something that fits well in the new design and the images don’t look messy in user feeds. But I have asked Android Authority’s AssembleDebug about this, he is well known for doing teardown of the source codes of apps and reveal insights. He told me that its server side code that’s why its not possible to see how Google is displaying images in this new full width design and what specific aspect ratios of images Google is using while rendering the feed in Google App.
It's all server side. The code is obfuscated, so it's hard to find out what's going on. I have this full width feed in discover on all of my devices.
— AssembleDebug (Shiv) (@AssembleDebug) April 21, 2025
Also I’ve asked Google too but haven’t gotten any reply yet.
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