Top Stories
The Google Top Stories carousel displays recent news articles at the top of the SERP for current-events queries. Eligibility requires NewsArticle or Article schema, an identifiable author, and recent publication — generally within the past 48 hours.
In practice
The Top Stories carousel is visible on mobile for the vast majority of news-related queries. An article published within the first hour after an event statistically has more chance of appearing there than an in-depth piece published 12 hours later. Core Web Vitals (page speed) have been an official eligibility criterion since 2021 — an LCP above 4 seconds can exclude an article from the carousel despite strong content quality.