What exactly happen when users Follow a site

[john john]

I read many articles about what happens when we follow a site in sharepoint online, i found those main 2 benefits:-

1. The sites will appear under the "Following" section on the SharePoint home page @ _layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx.

2. Also modern search should prioritize content from the sites the user is following.

But still i do not feel the benefits of Follow, for example when i go to my SharePoint home page @ _layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx. , i will get a list of the sites which i am following, and there will be a News section as follow:-

but now if i un-follow a site, its news items will still be shown on the a above "News from sites" web part.. so is this valid?

so can anyone advice on the benefits we get when we follow a sharepoint Site?

[#2]

Hi John,

Good to hear from you.

Follow Sites has many other benefits than just search , its driven by the Office Graph internally

It’s a kind of bookmark and Quick link, you can easily find the site that you liked.
Sites When you copy files from one site/library to another. You get to presented with a short list of sites of your followed sites these sites are listed based on Office Graph. So you don’t have to search the site to copy a single file.
When it comes to Mobile apps SharePoint or Onedrive app its not that easy to search or work like a desktop , these followed sites will be listed under user-built hierarchical menus.
When you have 1000 of sites in your portal, when you try to do “save as” a file you don’t have to go through searching for several sites to save them if you have the followed list of sites
By following a site, you tell SharePoint modern search (Office Graph) that the site and its content are important. So anytime you do a search from SharePoint Home or Office 365 Home or Delve, content from followed sites is prioritized.

[#3]

Thuyavan nailed it, it's basically mostly used for having short links to sites when browsing via any app such as onedrive etc. and copy to move to etc. for followed sites. The reason your news still shows up after removing is it takes time for the index to update and remove those news articles. They may stay up as well because they are sites you've visited when following etc. since the news feed is tailored to sites relevant to you not just your followed sites.

[#4]

If users Follow my site and it makes it a quick link for them.  How do I convey to them that I have done some edits to that Sharepoint page?

[#5]

In addition to all the points mentioned above, when a site is followed, SharePoint Online sends email notifications on changes made to the site content. That's what we are noticing. Is there any way to limit/filter of the email notifications?

[#6]

Found this article - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/set-your-sharepoint-email-notification-preferences-5bd63d...

but it does not say anything about content changes on site pages...

[#7]

Since the followed sites now appear under the globe icon in the SharePoint vertical navigation there seems to be a difference between the site and the navigation.
We have a user that clearly follows a site. It does appear in the vertical navigation under "Follow" but is not listed within the tiles on the site.
Do both parts fetch their information from different sources?
Unfollow & follow again did not heal the problem.

[#8]

Hi - I had the same question.