Google announced a new label for top stories named “highly cited” about two weeks ago. The highly cited label is now showing up for select news stories in the mobile search results.

Joe Pawlikowski spotted this in the wild and posted a screenshot of it on Twitter (hat tip @ShalomGood):

I can replicate this, so this does seem to be fully live in the US English mobile results.

The highly cited label will help searchers “identify stories that have been frequently cited by other news organizations, giving you a simple way to find the most helpful or relevant information for a news story,” Google said. Google added that this works for all sorts of stories including “investigative article, to an interview, an announcement, a press release or a local news story.”

So it is now live and the way Google knows if a label should be added to a news story is based on links, in general.

Forum discussion at Twitter.