Google News & Bing News 2026: How publishers actually get listed

If you try to find out how a news website gets included in Google News or Bing News in 2026, you quickly end up in a documentation maze: Google's Publisher Center still exists, but it is no longer responsible for actual Google News inclusion. Microsoft still refers to Bing PubHub in a current support page, while Bing itself now explicitly states on the PubHub policy page that PubHub has been discontinued.

The most important takeaway is therefore: the old model of "submit publication, wait for review, get approved" has largely disappeared at both major search engines. For the actual selection of news, Google and Bing rely on automated systems in 2026. Microsoft Start, or MSN, on the other hand, is a separate partner program with its own feed and licensing workflow.

Status of this guide: 18 September 2026.

The four systems you shouldn't confuse with each other

Four different products are currently relevant for publishers:

Google News, Top Stories and the News tab: no application anymore. Suitable content is considered automatically.
Google Publisher Center: still exists, but is no longer a submission form for Google News.
Bing News: new PubHub applications are no longer possible. Bing now evaluates news automatically.
MSN/Microsoft Start Partner Hub: separate publisher and syndication program with feed ingestion, moderation and possible revenue.

Many older SEO guides blur these four layers. That is exactly where the impression comes from that you still need to find some hidden form.

Google News: There is 2026 no longer an application

Google has gradually ended the old publisher workflow.

Since 25 April 2024, publishers can no longer set up new Google News publications in the Publisher Center. The changeover was fully completed at the end of March 2025: publication pages in Google News have since been generated automatically. RSS feeds or web locations previously submitted by publishers no longer control these pages.

Google states the consequence quite clearly: web content is automatically considered for Google News, provided it meets the general requirements and news policies.

However, this does not mean that every indexed news item automatically becomes visible. Two things need to be separated:

Eligibility: may the article in principle appear on news surfaces?

Ranking: Is it actually selected for a specific story and displayed prominently?

For ranking, Google cites, among other things, relevance, prominence, trustworthiness or authority, freshness, user-friendliness, location and language.

A "Google News approval" no longer exists.

What does the Google Publisher Center still do, then?

The Publisher Center 2026 causes particular confusion because it still allows publications and organisations to be managed there.

However, it is no longer the route into Google News.

Google continues to use the Publisher Center, among other things, for:

basic publication and organisation data,
user permissions,
Reader Revenue Manager,
Google News Showcase for participating publishers.

The former Google News tile and the manual configuration of the News publication page have been discontinued.

So anyone who sets up a publication in the Publisher Center does not thereby apply for inclusion in Google News. Conversely, a website can appear in Google News without ever having gone through this old submission process.

What Google News technically actually needs

The good news about automation: there is 2026 a relatively clear technical checklist.

1. Every article needs a permanent, unique URL

Google News requires stable article pages. An article should not appear under a new URL every day after publication.

Larger CMS or domain migrations should also be handled cleanly with permanent redirects.

2. The article text must be crawlable

Google recommends classic HTML article pages. Essential content should not be hidden exclusively in client-side JavaScript.

News and category hubs should also contain real, crawlable HTML links to new articles.

3. Date and time must be visible

Google News tries to detect publication and update times automatically. The safest setup is a visible date and time directly in the article, ideally between the headline and the text.

In addition, `datePublished` and, where applicable, `dateModified` should be marked up correctly.

Artificial "freshness bumping" is not a solution. Google explicitly warns against simply giving old articles a new date without a substantial update.

4. Clear authors and publisher transparency

For news sources, Google expects:

clear bylines,
information about authors,
information about the publication and publisher,
information about the company or network,
ways to get in contact.

In practice, this means real author names, meaningful author profiles, a informative About Us page and easy-to-find contact details.

For news publishing, this transparency is far more important than any "Google News sign-up form".

The Google News sitemap is useful – but not an application

A news sitemap is still worthwhile.

It helps Google find new articles faster and crawl a news section more comprehensively. Google recommends a separate news sitemap or news tags within an existing sitemap.

Two rules are important here:

Only articles from the last two days belong in the news sitemap.
A news sitemap can contain a maximum of 1.000 `news:news` entries.

Older articles can remain indexed as usual. They only need to be removed from the news-specific part of the sitemap.

The sitemap is submitted via Search Console.

It increases crawl speed and coverage. It is not a confirmation of inclusion.

NewsArticle schema: useful, but not mandatory

The same applies to structured data.

Google supports `Article`, `NewsArticle` and `BlogPosting`. Useful details include in particular:

Headline,
Images,
`datePublished`,
`dateModified`,
Author with name and own URL.

At the same time, Google explicitly states that article markup is not a prerequisite for Google News features such as Top Stories.

Schema helps with understanding and display. It is not a ticket into the news index.

Editorial guidelines: the commercial side of a website matters

Technology alone is not enough.

Google requires a clear separation between editorial content and advertising. Sponsored content must be recognisable as such. Promotional content and advertising should not outweigh the actual news content on a page.

This is especially relevant for publishers who also operate shops, affiliate sites, comparison offers or their own products.

A commercial business model does not automatically exclude a site from Google News. However, the editorial function of a news article must remain recognisable.

Google also prohibits deceptive previews, problematic manipulated media and other content covered by its News and Search policies.

How can you tell whether Google News has included a publisher at all?

This is exactly where Google's current workflow is unusual: there is no approval screen.

The most reliable option is therefore the Search Console.

The separate Performance report for Google News includes impressions, clicks and CTR from:

news.google.com,
the Google News app for Android,
the Google News app for iOS.

However, the report only appears once a website has collected enough impressions.

The News tab of regular Google Search is tracked separately in the standard Search performance report. There, "News" must be selected as the Search Type.

A `site:domain.tld` test can show whether Google indexes content from the domain. However, it is not a formal confirmation of Google News admission.

After inclusion, additional mechanisms can help. With Google Preferred Sources, readers can, for example, actively mark a publication as a preferred source – but this replaces neither eligibility nor normal ranking.

Bing News: This is exactly where the documentation 2026 is broken

With Bing, the situation is almost absurd.

A currently reachable Microsoft support page titled "How to submit your news website to Bing?" still lists three steps:

Meet the Bing Webmaster Guidelines,
Verify the website in Bing Webmaster Tools,
Submit the website to Bing News PubHub.

At the same time, the equally current Bing Webmaster page with the PubHub Publisher Guidelines states at the very top:

"Bing PubHub is retired."

Both are online in parallel.

Anyone who follows the old support article and tries to open PubHub therefore ends up in exactly the dead or no-longer-usable workflow that many SEO guides still link to.

What actually happened to Bing PubHub

Microsoft discontinued PubHub for new applications in June 2025.

The retirement notice published at the time explained that no new publisher applications are accepted anymore. Instead, automated systems should identify suitable news based on signals such as:

Authority,
Originality,
Relevance,
Freshness,
Location,
Language

and evaluate them for Bing News.

In essence, Bing has taken the same path as Google: automated news selection instead of manual submission.

Existing PubHub publishers remained in the news index. Applications that were still open at the time should continue to be reviewed.

For a new publisher, there is 2026 no longer a working public PubHub application route.

What Bing publishers 2026 can do instead

The lack of a submission route does not mean you have no influence.

Verify in Bing Webmaster Tools

The domain should be set up in Bing Webmaster Tools. There you can see crawling, indexing, sitemaps and search performance.

Keep the XML sitemap clean

Microsoft still fully supports the standard sitemap protocol and explicitly recommends sitemaps, including in the AI search era.

Enable IndexNow

For news websites, IndexNow is particularly interesting.

This lets a website tell Bing directly that a URL has been newly published, updated or removed. It does not guarantee indexing, but it can significantly speed up discovery.

Especially for breaking news, this speed advantage is far more useful than searching for a PubHub form that no longer exists.

Provide good Open Graph images

When PubHub was retired, Microsoft noted that publishers can also mark up suitable news thumbnails via the Open Graph Protocol.

For article pages, you should therefore have high-quality, sufficiently large `og:image` assets available.

Meet Bing News quality signals

Bing's still-published Publisher Guidelines especially mention:

Newsworthiness,
Originality,
Authority,
Regular publication,
Good readability,
Clear authors,
Sources and attribution,
Publisher and contact information.

Here too, the practical task is therefore: look like a traceable news publication, not find a secret submit button.

Bing Webmaster Tools now even shows AI Visibility

2026 Microsoft is more transparent than Google on another publisher topic: Bing Webmaster Tools now has an AI Performance Report.

The report shows, among other things, which URLs are cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing AI answers and which grounding queries led to them.

This is not a Bing News inclusion report. But it shows how strongly publisher distribution is now moving away from classic blue links.

This very development is forcing publishers to think about distribution more broadly anyway. Srocket recently examined how USA Today and the New York Times are restructuring their audience teams for AI search and how publishers are developing new direct feed products for AI agents and internal models.

Microsoft Start and MSN Partner Hub are a different system

Another common mistake is equating Bing News with Microsoft Start or MSN Partner Hub.

The MSN Partner Hub is not a necessary intermediate step to be considered algorithmically in Bing News.

It is a separate content partner system. Approved publishers can deliver content to Microsoft via feed; the posts are moderated technically and editorially and can be displayed on MSN or Microsoft surfaces.

Microsoft documents there, among other things:

automatic feed ingestion,
publishing and rejection status,
appeals,
traffic and revenue reporting,
rules on authors, images and sources.

That is much closer to a classic publisher syndication program than Bing News itself.

Can you apply to 2026 for Microsoft Start/MSN?

Here it becomes less transparent again.

The Partner Hub is actively running and Microsoft publishes current guidelines. However, publicly documented onboarding routes for new independent publishers are limited.

As recently as June, 2026 a publisher reported in Microsoft's own Q&A platform that the Microsoft Start publisher flow requires an invite code and appears to be invite-only. 2025 the same access restriction was already described in Microsoft's community. Microsoft's publicly accessible partner documentation does explain the ongoing operation of the Partner Hub, but it does not describe a universally open admission process for new independent publishers.

For now, the MSN Partner Hub should therefore be seen as a managed partner program rather than an open news submission channel. This is an assessment of the publicly visible onboarding, not a statement that Microsoft fundamentally accepts no new partners.

It is also important how much stricter the partner requirements are: Microsoft's current MSN Publishing Guidelines, for example, call for at least ten articles daily including live or breaking coverage for news publishers.

Among other things, the following are also required:

an About page with owner and contact option,
Terms of Use,
Privacy Policy,
disclosure of conflicts of interest,
clear authors and sources,
rights to images and media,
no hidden advertorials or primarily promotional content.

These requirements apply to the MSN partner program – not as a general prerequisite for Bing to consider an individual article algorithmically in the news index.

The practical news publishing checklist for 2026

If you are building a new news publication today, you can largely ignore the old submission guides.

For Google:

Verify your site in Search Console.
Keep the news section fully crawlable.
Use permanent article URLs.
Show a visible publication date and time.
Provide real bylines and author profiles.
Maintain clean About, publisher and contact information.
Deliver a separate news sitemap covering the last two days.
Maintain `NewsArticle` markup cleanly.
Clearly label advertising and sponsored content.
Monitor Google News and Search news performance in Search Console.

For Bing:

Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools.
Submit clean XML sitemaps.
Enable IndexNow for new and updated articles.
Do not block Bingbot.
Deliver large, unique Open Graph images.
Make newsworthiness, originality, authors and sources visible.
Stop waiting for a new PubHub application.

Optional for MSN/Microsoft Start:

Track partner hub onboarding,
respond to a possible invitation or activation,
meet the considerably stricter feed and publishing guidelines if accepted.

The most important change: news publishing is a ranking problem again

In the past, you could at least psychologically separate two steps:

"Am I accepted?" and then "How do I rank?"

2026 blurs this boundary.

Google and Bing have largely removed the visible acceptance process for new publishers. As a result, there is also no longer a green "Approved" status to hold on to.

The real proof only emerges once the systems actually use the publisher: through Search Console impressions, news traffic, Bing visibility or recurring inclusion in current story clusters.

This is uncomfortable, but conceptually simpler:

There is no longer a secret Google News or Bing News application that you just have to find.

There are crawlable contents, technical freshness signals, transparent publisher identity, original reporting – and algorithmic selection.

For publishers, the direct relationship with readers therefore becomes more important too. Features such as Google Preferred Sources or new monetisation models such as Google's pay-per-use test for AI publishers show that news distribution now reaches far beyond the old "Google News directory".