Google Discover is becoming a lifeline for gaming publishers amid declining search traffic.
From the beginning of 2025 to the end of 2025, gaming publications experienced a 138-percent increase in Google Discover traffic, according to an analysis by media company Raptive of 197 gaming websites in its network, including Reset Era, Insider Gaming and Bulbapedia, between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026.
As search traffic for editorial content declines across the board, smaller websites are increasingly leveraging Google Discover — a personalized, AI-driven content feed served on Google’s mobile homepage and apps — as a source of new eyeballs. Raptive’s data, shared exclusively with GamesBeat, shows that courting Discover traffic has been particularly effective for websites in the gaming space over the past year.
“What’s fundamentally different about Discover from search is that it is interest-based and topical, rather than being key-word based,” said Raptive executive vice president of audience growth Tom Critchlow, who authored Raptive’s gaming Discover report, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We have some sites in our network that talk about ‘Magic: The Gathering’ a lot. As a ‘Magic: The Gathering’ fan, you’re not necessarily going to Google and being like, ‘what are the best “Magic” cards this month?’ But if you see that card in your feed, you might still be interested in that topic.”
Raptive’s research comes at a timely moment for Google Discover, just over a month after Google released its first-ever Discover-specific core update in February. After last month’s update, Raptive experienced a 20-percent spike in gaming websites in its network whose Discover traffic went up, a positive signal after some websites reported a plunge in Google Discover traffic during the second half of 2025. Critchlow said that the websites that appear to be benefiting most from the recent update are smaller sites in the “long tail” of Raptive’s network.
“The Discover update that just happened in February appears to be accentuating that shift,” he said.
Compared to other content categories, gaming websites tended to overindex on Google Discover traffic, with roughly 50 percent of all tech and gaming traffic in Raptive’s network coming from Google Discover, compared to 15 percent for home and garden websites and 35 percent for arts and creativity sites. The only category for which Google Discover accounted for a higher proportion of traffic was news and current events websites, which currently get 76 percent of their traffic from Google Discover, per Raptive’s analysis.
Optimizing for Discover
Critchlow said it was unlikely that “Discover engine optimization” would become a full-fledged practice in the near future, but that websites would likely benefit from treating Discover optimization similarly to search engine optimization by iterating on what works and what doesn’t. He pointed out that many websites typically under-publish on weekends, even though that’s when Discover usage and clicks are strongest — ånd that websites could get more Discover traffic by focusing on a tight, niche core topic.
“Treat it like a channel that you can optimize for — which, frankly, hasn’t been the mindset of a lot of publishers — they’ve been stuck in this mindset that it’s a black box,” Critchlow said. “But, actually, there are things that you can do to optimize.”