Google News Transparency Checklist: Dates, Bylines, Ownership, and Contact Information

01

Checklist

• Show one clear publication date near the headline and article text.
• Show an update date after a material revision and keep cosmetic edits from manufacturing false freshness.
• Make the time zone clear when timing matters and keep visible, structured, feed, and sitemap dates consistent.
• Display a named author or responsible desk near the article.
• Provide an accessible author page with role, biography, expertise, recent work, and an accountability path where appropriate.
• Identify the operating publisher, legal or organizational owner, parent company, and relevant network relationships.
• Maintain an accessible About page, editorial mission, funding or commercial explanation where relevant, and named editorial responsibility.
• Provide working general, corrections, privacy, legal, and editorial contact paths without exposing personal details that create safety risk.
• Label sponsored, affiliate, promotional, and native advertising before engagement and identify the commercial relationship.
• Keep permanent article URLs, one consistent canonical, crawlable links, honest status codes, and accessible article bodies.
• Preserve original-source and licensing information for wire, syndicated, guest, or partner material.
• Keep the headline, date, byline, body, images, captions, and structured data mutually consistent.
• Publish a correction policy and add dated correction or retraction notes when material claims change.
• Permit crawling of intended articles, remove accidental noindex directives, maintain valid sitemaps, and verify rendered output.
• Treat Publisher Center as a management surface rather than a guaranteed inclusion application.

Google News article best practices recommend one clear date and time positioned between the headline and article text, without multiple competing dates on the page. ^[2] The event date, original publication date, and material update date should remain distinguishable. A publisher should not change the visible date merely because an editor corrected punctuation or refreshed a component.

Google News policies identify dates, bylines, author information, publication and publisher information, company or network context, and contact information as transparency considerations. ^[1] A byline should connect the article to a real author or responsible editorial desk. An author page can provide a biography, role, expertise, recent articles, contact or accountability channel, and relevant conflict disclosures. It should not publish personal contact data that creates avoidable safety risk.

Publisher identity requires more than a logo. The site should name the operating organization, explain ownership, disclose parent or network relationships, identify editorial leadership or responsibility, and keep policy pages accessible. Readers and systems should be able to determine who made the claim and which organization is accountable for it.

Contact paths need to work. A useful site provides general contact, corrections, privacy, legal, and editorial-tip channels where relevant. Assign an owner to each mailbox or form and test delivery. A dead contact page is not transparency; it is a decorative promise that has completed the normal web lifecycle by quietly failing.

Sponsored content should be labeled clearly and should not overwhelm the publisher’s primary editorial content. Google News policy says sponsored material should be disclosed. ^[1] Identify advertisers and affiliate relationships, separate paid placement from reporting, qualify links where appropriate, and avoid structured data that misrepresents authorship or editorial status.

Article URLs should be permanent and unique. Google News discovery and technical guidance recommends crawlable article links, accessible content, and stable URLs. ^{[3] [5]} Avoid session parameters, arbitrary date changes, long redirect chains, inaccessible JavaScript shells, and duplicate routes that disagree about the canonical article.

The article page should show the headline, date, byline, and main text clearly. Advertising and navigation should not obscure the reporting. Images need documented rights, useful captions, and accessible alt text. Structured data should match what a reader sees rather than describing a cleaner imaginary article.

Corrections need public structure. Publish a correction policy, date material correction notes, explain what changed, identify whether the conclusion changed, and preserve retraction status. Maintain internal revision history and notify syndication partners when a material correction affects their copies.

For syndication and wire content, name the original source, preserve the licensed byline, maintain an update and correction path, review canonical or duplicate handling, and avoid claiming original reporting that the publisher did not perform. Local additions should be distinguishable from the supplied material.

Technical discovery still matters. Intended news articles should be crawlable, indexable, served with honest 200 responses, linked through ordinary HTML navigation, included appropriately in sitemaps, and visible in rendered output. Images and article text should load for users and crawlers. Search Console should be monitored for coverage, rendering, and policy signals.

Google automatically considers eligible web content for Google News and related surfaces. Publisher Center configuration does not guarantee appearance. ^[4] A publisher should therefore treat transparency and technical quality as reader-accountability requirements rather than a ritual intended to unlock a guaranteed traffic pipe.

A site review should search for orphan author pages, missing bylines, conflicting dates, dead contact forms, hidden ownership, expired policies, unlabeled sponsorship, duplicate article URLs, false update dates, inaccessible bodies, and structured data that disagrees with the page.

02

Completion criteria

A publisher passes this checklist when article dates are clear and consistent, bylines connect reporting to responsible authors or desks, author information is accessible, publisher identity and ownership are visible, contact paths work, sponsorship is disclosed, article URLs are permanent, pages are crawlable, corrections are public, and technical discovery remains healthy.

Meeting these conditions does not guarantee Google News inclusion, placement, or traffic. It does make the publication legible enough for readers and systems to understand who made a claim, when it was published, who owns the outlet, how commercial relationships are disclosed, and where accountability lives when the reporting changes or proves wrong.

References

Sources behind this record

1. Google News policies — Google News Publisher Help (accessed August 3, 2026)
2. Article page best practices — Google News Publisher Help (accessed August 3, 2026)
3. Help Google News discover your web-crawled content — Google News Publisher Help (accessed August 3, 2026)
4. Publisher Center and automatically generated publication pages — Google News Publisher Help (accessed August 3, 2026)
5. Google News technical guidelines — Google News Publisher Help (accessed August 3, 2026)

Corrections

Correction history

No corrections recorded.

To report an error, use the public corrections path.