Messages posted in Discord’s largest public communities will start appearing in Google and other search engines from mid-December. Discord announced the change in a blog post on Tuesday, 27 October. It covers more than 63,000 Discoverable Servers. It is on by default for adults in most countries, though not in Europe.

Discoverable Servers are the communities that anyone can join without an invite. They need at least 1,000 members and must be at least eight weeks old. They must also meet Discord’s activity and safety rules. Their admins chose to list them in Discord’s Server Discovery. The changes leave private servers, direct messages and group chats untouched.

“This has led to valuable information being locked in Discord conversations, inaccessible to the wider internet. We want to fix this,” wrote Kelsey Duncombe-Smith, a group product manager at Discord.

Two stages, both on by default

From 16 November, every Discoverable Server gets a Server Web Page, a public page that describes the community.…