Recent data from Chartbeat indicates that traffic to news publishers from Google, including Google Discover, has stabilized over the past few years. This study examined 565 US and UK news websites since January 2019 and reported a steady traffic percentage despite the introduction of AI Overviews. While referrals from search have shown a small decline, Google remains a significant source of traffic, constituting 96.2% of overall search traffic. Concerns about diminished search clicks due to AI features have not translated to a drastic decline in traffic to major news publishers.
Search (including Google Discover) is still growing as a percentage of overall traffic referrals despite concerns since the arrival of Google's AI Overviews in 2024 and AI Mode this year of a precipitous drop to traffic coming from search as people get the information they wanted without needing to click through to a website.
Search referrals made up 15.52% of the total in January 2019, with a first peak in March 2020 of 20.62% and now 19.03% in July after a fairly consistent few months.
Google, and not including Discover, continues to make up 96.2% of search traffic to the sites analysed by Chartbeat. This proportion has consistently been between 95.1% and 96.8% since January 2019.
New data from Chartbeat suggests that "search" as a source of total traffic to major news publishers has remained stable over the last year.
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