How Google Ranks “Top Stories” News

John Mueller: "The “In the News” and the “Top Stories” section in the search results are completely algorithmic and based partially on the content, partially on the queries, partially on how we think it makes sense to show websites with that kind of top stories set up there. Some of this I believe also depends on whether you are using AMP on your pages, valid AMP or not, so all of these things kind of come in together. Essentially, it is organic ranking and that kind of determines which URLs we show in which parts of the search results.

"So specifically in regards to these one boxes and different parts of the search results it really depends on a number of different factors. So there’s no one single thing to always show up there or to never show up there." How Google Ranks “Top Stories” News in Search Results