Table of contents:
Overview
News briefings on Google Assistant enables users to browse top headlines throughout the day, access the latest news in specific content categories (for example, sports or business), or find news from a specific news provider. The user does this by interacting with their Google Assistant-enabled devices, as demonstrated in the following picture with Google Home:
Use this guide to help onboard your news content for news briefings on Google Assistant.
- Review the eligibility and availability guidelines below.
- Ensure that your news feed(s) follows the technical requirements. Check out the examples.
- Submit or update your feed to onboard new content, or update metadata or add video news briefings.
- Review these helpful resources:
- Read the best practices guide to optimize your news content for news briefings.
- Visit the troubleshooting FAQs if you encounter any issues with the feature.
Eligibility and availability
This section provides details that determine your news content’s eligibility for news briefings on Assistant, and the feature’s availability for Google Assistant users around the world.
Eligibility
To be considered, your content must meet these eligibility requirements:
- Features audio and video news in one of these categories:
- Art
- Business
- Entertainment
- General
- Health
- Lifestyle
- National
- Politics
- Science
- Sports
- Technology
- World
- Provides timely and regular news updates, such as hourly or daily.
- Is in at least one of the languages and countries listed in the Availability section.
- Follows the Google Assistant content policies.
- May contain custom monetization solutions and promotional content.
Video Eligibility
Your video news content must follow these additional requirements.
Video content requirements:
Availability
Users can access news briefings on Assistant in the following languages and countries:
|
Language |
Countries |
Audio news briefings |
Video news briefings |
| Chinese | TW |  |
|
| Danish | DK | |
|
| Dutch | BE, NL | |
NL only |
| English | AU, CA, GB, IE, IN, PH, SG, US | |
AU, CA, GB, IN, US, SG only |
| French | BE, CA, CH, FR | |
CA, FR only |
| German | AT, BE, CH, DE | |
DE only |
| Hindi | IN | |
|
| Indonesian | ID | |
|
| Italian | CH, IT | |
IT only |
| Japanese | JP | |
|
| Korean | KO | |
|
| Norwegian | NO | |
|
| Portuguese | BR | |
|
| Spanish | AR, CO, CL, ES, MX, PE, US | |
ES only |
| Swedish | SE | |
|
| Thai | TH | |
Tip: Video news briefings are only available on Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max devices.
Users can select news sources across the entire news briefings on Assistant corpus, including those in languages and countries outside of their home language or geographical location. For example, a user in the U.S. can add news sources targeted towards English in the U.S. and Canada, Spanish in Mexico, and Japanese.
Submit or update your feed
If your news content meets all the news briefings on Assistant eligibility guidelines and technical requirements, you can submit your content for onboarding. Once submitted, we’ll conduct an onboarding review and get your content live on Google Assistant. This entire process usually takes up to 5-7 business days.
Submit your feed
Submit your news content using one of these methods:
- Audio news briefings: Submit onboarding request (audio only)
- Audio & video news briefings: Submit onboarding request (audio + video)
- Video news briefings
- If you onboarded audio news briefings in the past, you can add video news briefings by submitting an update request.
- If you haven’t onboarded audio news briefings before, and only have video news content available, your content isn’t eligible for news briefings on Google Assistant. See eligibility guidelines for more information.
Quick reminders for onboarding
Update your feed
If you’ve previously onboarded content on news briefings on Assistant, you can make updates to existing meta-data or add video news content. Our system currently doesn’t automatically update changes made to your RSS feed's metadata, so please notify us when you make any modifications.
Submit your update request
Fill out the form to submit an update request. Once you submit, our team will review and process your request, which can take up to 5-7 business days.
Quick reminders for updating
The following list shows the customization options and specifications for your feed metadata:
|
Metadata Type |
Specifications |
| Title |
RSS feed name. This is the same for both audio and video news briefings. |
| Audio feed URL | Updates to Audio feed Urls require additional time for quality reviews (5-7 business days). |
| Video feed URL | Add a Video feed Url to supplement your audio news briefings through an update request. This process requires additional time for quality reviews (5-7 business days). |
| Description | The description of your news content. |
| Image URL | Make sure your image is at least 1400x1400 pixels. |
| News Category |
Available news categories:
|
| Synonyms | You can request up to five synonyms that accurately represent your news content and brand, including phonetic spellings. |
To check how your content appears, visit your Google Account settings 
Updating video news briefings
If you onboarded audio news briefings previously, you can add video news briefings by submitting an update request.
- Double-check the additional video requirements and availability in the eligibility guidelines, and ensure your video news RSS feed meets our technical requirements.
- Then, submit an update request via the link above.
Best practices
Follow these best practices to keep your content fresh and optimized for news briefings on Assistant.
Keep news content updated frequently and consistently
Encourage users to select your content as their preferred news source
Tell users all the different ways to launch your news content on Assistant-enabled devices
Prevent your news briefings from showing up in open-source features (e.g., Google Podcasts.
Notify us when making changes or updates to your news content metadata, such as its title, RSS feed URL, and description. For more information, see Submit or update your feed.
Troubleshooting FAQs
Are your news briefings not displaying accurately or properly within the Google Account setting’s News services?
Are users having trouble accessing your news briefings on Google Assistant? Is Google Assistant playing content that is unexpected for the query or command?
Are users having trouble accessing your news briefings when using a query or command in a different language? For example, trying to use Hindi to launch an English-produced news briefing?
Is your news briefings content showing up in other open source RSS features such as Google Podcasts, and you would like it removed?
Do you have other issues with your news briefings on Google Assistant?
Contact our audio news support team to provide detailed information about the issue you're experiencing.