A Google search for this story’s subject is now much less likely to lead to a click through to this page, according to data from Chartbeat shared in a new report from the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
The firm’s analysis of traffic metrics from 2,756 news sites around the world, 797 in the US, shows a painfully steep drop in Google search traffic over the last year: 33% worldwide and 38% in the US. Much of that drop, especially outside the US, happened after Google began rolling out AI Overview search results that provide a software-generated, multi-paragraph answer, in which you often have to click additional times to see links to the sources Google drew on for that reply.
That’s a much worse decline than what the news-media trade group Digital Context Next observed in August, when it reported about a 10% decline in Google search traffic to member sites.
In the Reuters Institute report, senior research associate Nic Newman wrote that “it is not clear how much of this is down to AI overviews,” and observed that not all news sites might suffer the same drop. The chart for US traffic shows it increasing over several months after the debut of Google’s AI search results.
“Queries around ‘hard news’ subjects in Google have been largely exempted from overviews, perhaps because of so-called hallucinations,” he wrote. “Publishers that specialize in lifestyle or utility content such as weather, TV guides, or horoscopes are more likely to have been affected.”
Asked for comment, Google sent a statement saying its data doesn’t show the dramatic drops in traffic recounted in this report, questioning Chartbeat’s selection of those sites, and calling out an August report from that firm that showed stable search traffic to news sites.
Google also noted the absence of Google News click-through figures, a detail listed in fine print below each chart in the study, and pointed to the company’s recent addition of allowing web users to pick “Preferred Sources” in Google News and its efforts to raise the visibility of links in AI-generated results.
But the Chartbeat data in this new report also shows serious slides in traffic from Google Discover, the screen of suggested links you’ll see by swiping from left to right on an Android phone: a 21% drop worldwide and 29% in the US. And since Google Discover now drives more traffic than Google’s regular search, according to Chartbeat’s metrics—13% of referral traffic worldwide, versus 7.3% for Google search—that’s troubling too.
Trends in referral traffic from Facebook and X should further unsettle newsrooms. Since May 2023, Chartbeat has found that Facebook traffic has plunged by 43% worldwide and 35% in the US, with X referrals falling even faster, by 46% worldwide and 45% in the States.
Get Our Best Stories!
Your Daily Dose of Our Top Tech News
By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy
Policy.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
Confusingly enough, the news sites Chartbeat tracked saw more referrals over only the past year from those platforms, especially in the US: 23% growth for Facebook, 29% for X.
The Reuters Institute also quizzed a large contingent of digital-media executives about their plans, and they seem uninterested in plugging away at either social site or with Google search. Questions about whether they would put more or less effort into various platforms yielded a net score of -23 for Facebook, -25 for Google search, and -52 for X.
Facebook still has a massive audience, but newsroom managers have reasons not to rely on it after more than a decade of bait-and-switch behavior: the social network has rolled out new features and services for publishers and then scrapped them.
Recommended by Our Editors
X, meanwhile, has seen its reach ebb for years; Elon Musk’s takeover of the former Twitter has not slowed that, but has led to policies hostile to news, such as downranking posts with links or temporarily hiding headlines from link previews.
The institute’s report says these newsroom executives instead plan to put more effort into YouTube, AI platforms, and TikTok, with net scores of +74, +61, and +56. Publishers also seem cautiously optimistic about the money-making potential of licensing their content to AI platforms, with 20% expecting those deals to yield “substantial” revenues and 49% expecting “minor” revenues.
The institute’s report doesn’t just outline economic and technological risks to newsrooms; it also cites increasingly sharp denunciations by President Trump and other right-wing politicians of media organizations deemed biased or fake; in Trump’s case, these have included high-profile lawsuits against the likes of CBS and the BBC.
Had this document been published on Wednesday instead of Monday, it could have noted a new escalation of Trump’s campaign against newsrooms: the FBI’s unprecedented search and seizure on Wednesday of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s personal and work laptops, phone, and smartwatch as part of an investigation into alleged leaks.
But the report ends on a somewhat optimistic note, citing the success of some publishers in building subscription models and the value of quality content versus AI slop and toxic social media: “This year’s survey shows that news executives recognize the challenges ahead and are up for the fight.”
About Our Expert
Experience
Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
Read Full Bio
