Spotlight on BILD
Our “spotlight case studies” give you a quick look at a customer success story.
In this spotlight, we look at how BILD used Oncrawl’s Google Discover Lens to better understand their Discover performance and adjust their strategy accordingly.
Improving Google Discover visibility for a high-volume news publisher
For news and media sites, Google Discover is both a huge opportunity and a frustrating mystery. A single article can bring in over a million visits, yet Discover offers almost no native insight into why some pages take off and others never appear.
BILD, one of Europe’s largest news publishers, wanted to stop guessing. With AI Overviews and a growing list of LLMs complicating organic search, they needed to understand what actually drives Discover performance and feed that back into their editorial strategy.
By auditing their Discover data with Oncrawl, they were able to confirm what works (and doesn’t) for their site.
Situation
BILD generates a significant amount of Discover traffic, but they had limited visibility into it. Discover traffic is hard to isolate as analytics tools often bucket it as “direct” or “other,” and Search Console alone won’t reveal page depth, internal linking, recency, or other technical signals behind performance. BILD needed to connect Discover outcomes to the SEO metrics they could actually influence.
Approach
Working with Oncrawl’s Google Discover Lens, BILD could examine Google Search Console Discover data at the same time as technical SEO data from the crawler.
Using Oncrawl’s segmentation feature, they grouped pages by impressions, clicks, depth, author presence, paywall status, title length, and publication date. This allowed them to cross-analyze Discover performance against any metric in the analysis.
Analysis
The Google Discover Lens surfaced clear patterns for the BILD site. Visibility in Google Discover correlated with technical SEO health:
- Page depth and Discover impressions are strongly correlated (deep pages don’t appear at all).
- Well-linked pages won more Discover traffic.
- Articles with a named author earned nearly 2x the clicks of those without, reinforcing E-E-A-T signals.
- Paywalled articles performed better than non-paywalled ones
- Neutral, non-clickbait titles outperformed clickbait formats
BILD also confirmed that respecting Google’s guidelines helped their articles surface in Discover.
Value
The audit gave BILD’s editorial team concrete, data-backed guidance: keep important content shallow, link to it internally, always credit an author, and write honest titles.
The analysis also showed which of their categories were performing well and they were able to adjust their strategy accordingly. BILD chose to redirect their efforts towards under-performing categories with more growth potential.
