Move over Taboola, Google has come out with their own similar product for Google AdSense publishers, called Matched Content which will serve additional related article results to site visitors.

If you are wanting to know if your site has been approved, you will need to go for a hunt into your AdSense account.  Once you login, click the gear icon on the top right, then select “Site Management” under “Account.  Click on the “Owned” tab, and you will see a Matched Content column showing if you have been approved or not.

At this time, it seems that it will only show recommendations from your own site.  So in that regards, it isn’t serving up third-party articles that publishers can earn from on a EPC basis.  That said, I expect that is where Google AdSense plans to move with this product, especially as they have released it through the AdSense program.

It takes a few hours for content to be populated, so don’t be surprised if it shows up blank at the start.  However, some people are reporting that it simply seems to be pulling popular content from the entire website, rather than content actually related to the article on the page.  So it seems likely Google is somehow pulling data from search and/or webmaster tools to determine the displayed content.

While it doesn’t explicitly say it is beta, many publishers are considering it as such, and hope that the matching algo will be tweaked to show more true related content and not just simply overall popular content.

There is a forum thread at WebmasterWorld where some people who are testing the new product are discussing their findings.