Client · Sports media
Google Discover and Search strategy for The Athletic, The New York Times Company's sports newsroom, in the US and the UK.
- Vertical
- Sports media
- Markets
- United States and United Kingdom
- Period
- 2025–2026
The Athletic
The challenge
A subscription sports publisher that wanted to grow on Google Discover and Search without breaking its business model. With league, tournament and team calendars across two markets, the question was where to put the editorial focus to win distribution.
United States and United Kingdom
What we did
Discover and Search
Performance analysis by topic, league and team, story lifespan and publishing time slots.
Headlines
A benchmark of how other leading sports outlets write headlines for Discover.
Major events
Tournament retrospectives and planning for upcoming coverage.
Authorship and Knowledge Graph
Analysis of how Google understands the outlet's authors.
Entities on Discover
An entity map to surface editorial angles that aren't obvious.
Core updates and content gaps
Algorithm update monitoring and dashboards of uncovered topics.
2025–2026
How we work together
- Ongoing work alongside the editorial team.
- Data turned into recommendations for the newsroom: what to cover, when to publish and how to headline.
- Analysis before and after every major sporting event.
See the page for The New York Times Cases in this vertical
Other results, anonymized
Cases from other clients in the same vertical. None of them is The Athletic.
9M → 33M
clicks from Google Discover
General-interest publisher, LATAM
Editorial strategy for Discover, sustained since February 2022.
+200%
average daily clicks
General-interest publisher, Mexico
Recovery after four core updates, with no new penalties.
#1
in Comscore sports ranking
Sports publisher, Argentina
Ahead of the country's two biggest sports outlets; started with editorial work only.
Real cases, anonymized to respect each client's confidentiality. Results depend on the starting point and the category.
Other clients
For confidentiality, we don't publish figures for any named client.
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