What is the "Score" audience metric, and how is it calculated?

Google Discover is a personalized news feed. As such, every user sees a unique combination of articles. Acquiring exact traffic data for each article is near-impossible unless one uses a user panel so vast that the associated costs would be prohibitive.

Our algorithms can estimate article traffic within a ±20% accuracy range, relative to data from Google Discover's Search Console. We call this estimate the "Score" and we use it instead of "unique visits" or "page views" to avoid misleading representations. This score indicates the relative performance of an article or website. For instance, a score of "100" is assigned to the top-performing website and article in each time period. All other entities are scored in relation to these top performers; a score of "20" implies that the top website has an audience five times larger.