Messages from the public Discord server may soon be searchable on Google, but you can opt out

Discord is making a policy change that will further increase the visibility of conversations on its largest public servers. On November 16, the platform’s discoverable servers will all receive server web pages. These hubs will display basic server information, including a description and summaries of discussions happening on their public channels. In mid-December, Discord said messages posted to these channels could begin appearing verbatim on the server’s web pages and in search engine results. Neither channel summaries nor individual channel posts will display the poster’s username or avatar.

Discord’s stated reason for this change is to make it easier for information from these communities to appear in web searches. In other words, you might start seeing Discord pages and messages the same way you would find a Reddit thread among search results.

This change is limited to discoverable servers, large communities of at least 1,000 members where no invitation is required to join. Private servers, DMs and group DMs will remain private. But given that Discord just suffered a setback following the implementation of age verification policies, the move could raise new questions about how the platform handles privacy concerns.

Server administrators of these discoverable servers can take steps now to prevent the channels from being included in their possible web presence. And individual users can also choose to prevent their posts from being indexed on the discoverable server via the Data & Privacy section of Discord’s user settings. In some markets (EU, UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia and South Korea), channel messages will be disabled by default to comply with local regulations. So, for these regions, users will have to manually sign up for this feature. Teen Discord users are also excluded and do not have the ability to activate messages from the channel until they are of age.