Discord servers are about to be searchable. Here's what changes on 16 November

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Short answer

Discord is putting large public servers on the open web. From 16 November 2026, every Discoverable Server gets a public Server Web Page. From mid-December 2026, messages from public channels in those servers can start showing up in search results.

If you run a server that is 1,000+ members and listed in Server Discovery, you have about a week to decide which channels take part. If you are a member of one, you have until mid-December to decide whether your own messages appear. Both controls are now live.

Private servers, DMs and group DMs are not affected at all.

The timeline

Discord's framing is that useful knowledge has been trapped inside servers that used to be forums and wikis. Someone searching for a boss strategy or a build guide gets nothing, even though a hundred people have already answered it in a channel. Making that content findable sends new people into the conversation.

Whether that is good news depends entirely on what your server is for.

What actually gets published

There are 3 information sources that get published. All with their own controls, this is often what causes confusion online.

Server Web Page. A public page describing your server, so people can decide whether to join. Previously optional and fiddly to set up; from 16 November every Discoverable Server will have one. If yours does not exist yet, Discord generates a default page from your Server Profile, and you can edit it afterwards.

Channel Summaries. Automated summaries of what is being discussed in active channels, shown on the web page. Drawn from conversations from 16 November onwards. Admins can choose which channels they draw from, curate what is shown, or switch them off.

Channel Messages. From mid-December, individual messages from public channels can appear in search results, in the member's own words. This is often the part that raises privacy concerns among users.

What is excluded from all three: private servers, DMs and group DMs. Usernames and avatars are not shown next to messages or summaries. Messages sent before mid-December are not retroactively published. Channels where content may appear on the web are labelled, so members can see it before they post.

If you run a Discoverable Server

1. Open Server Settings → Web Presence. This is where every control lives.
2. Choose your channels. By default, public channels stay in. You can pick specific channels, or opt all of them out.
3. Check your summaries. Summaries are generated separately from messages, so turning messages off does not turn summaries off. Curate or disable them in the same place.
4. Think about what a stranger would find. An announcements channel is a good shop window. A support channel full of answered questions is even better. A general chat full of in-jokes read by someone who has never been in your server is not doing you any favours.
5. Decide whether you want to stay Discoverable at all. Having a Web Page is now part of being a Discoverable Server. If you do not want one, you can switch back to a Community Server and keep the invite link model.

Remember, the default for channels is on. If you do nothing, your public channels take part.

If you are a member

Go to User Settings → Data and Privacy and turn off the option to show your message content from Discoverable channels on web pages. There is one switch for all discoverable servers you are in.

It applies to your message content, not to summaries. Those are generated from broader channel topics and will keep appearing unless the admins turn them off. If you want neither, that is an admin conversation.

A note on geography: several outlets report the message-sharing default is switched off in the EU, the UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia and South Korea pending legal review. Discord's own announcement does not spell out per-country defaults, so check your own setting rather than assuming you are covered.

What it means if your server is multilingual

This is not something many people have considered: the dynamics of multilingual communities change when strangers can find and join them through search.

Until now, your community grew by invite. Someone already in your orbit brought a friend, usually someone who spoke the language the server spoke. Search breaks that. A public web page and indexed messages pull in strangers who found an answer to a specific question, from anywhere, in any language.

For a monolingual server that is a mild influx of new members who read the room. For a multilingual server it is a test of whether the room can hold them. Someone lands on your page from a search result, joins, asks their follow-up question in Portuguese or Hindi, gets no reply because nobody in the channel reads it, and leaves. You paid for that visitor with a public web page and lost them in ninety seconds.

That is the gap Jake exists to close:

• Automatic channel translation in 150+ languages, applied to new messages and edits as they are posted, set up once with /quickstart.
• Two-way translation, so one channel serves both language groups rather than splitting your community in half.
• Translations posted as the original sender, so the channel still reads like people talking instead of a wall of bot embeds.
• /summarize, which condenses a busy channel into a short recap, useful when a channel has been running in three languages since you last looked.
• 20,000 free characters a month, plus 1,000 per upvote, so a lot of communities never pay.

Two things worth knowing before you enable it in a channel you have just made public: Jake only reads channels where translation is set up, and the translations it posts are ordinary messages in that channel. If you would rather your translated copies were not candidates for indexing, keep that channel out of Web Presence, you can enable the automatic deletion of the original message or the translated copies as needed.

Try it

Add Jake to your server, run /quickstart, and pick the channels where a stranger's question is most likely to land. The features page covers the free tier.

FAQ

Which servers are affected? Discoverable Servers only: 1,000+ members, at least eight weeks old, meeting activity and safety requirements, and listed in Server Discovery. Discord counts more than 63,000 of them.

Do I have to do anything to get a Server Web Page? No. One goes live on 16 November either way. If you want it to look like your server rather than a default, set it up before then.

Will my old messages appear? No. Only messages sent from mid-December onwards are eligible.

Will my username be shown? No. Usernames and avatars are not shown on Server Web Pages, in summaries, or alongside indexed messages.

Can I turn it off entirely? Admins can opt every channel out, which leaves a web page with no conversations on it. To have no web page at all, switch the server back to Community Server status.

Does this apply to my private server or DMs? No. Private servers, DMs and group DMs are excluded from all of it.