Combined traffic to the ten biggest news websites in the US is down by almost a third compared to two years ago, new analysis shows.
The difference was even higher across the top 50 news websites in the US, with monthly visits falling 37% since July 2024.
Press Gazette has analysed monthly visits data for the biggest news websites in the US from July 2023 to July 2026 in order to examine the long-term changes in traffic trends.
Google introduced AI Overviews for all users in the US in May 2024. Other changes in the past three years include continued audience shifts towards social media, trends towards individual creators, and the rise of Claude and Perplexity (following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022).
Press Gazette tracks month-on-month and year-on-year traffic changes to the 50 biggest news websites every month but this is a look at the long-term trends.
The ten biggest newsbrands in the US by monthly visits in July 2026 saw a combined traffic fall of 18% compared to three years earlier.
Compared to July 2024, monthly visits to the same sites were down 32%. In the past year their combined traffic has fallen by 15%.
Four of the ten biggest sites did see traffic growth compared to three years ago.
The New York Times was narrowly up by 0.48% to 406.3 million visits, while People was up 10% to 126.6 million, the BBC was up by 3% to 96.9 million and Substack’s visits were up 179% to 95.9 million.
The data for Substack includes all the publications and individuals hosted on its platforms whose URL contains substack.com. Substack, which launched in 2017, crossed the three million paid subscription mark in February 2024 and five million in March 2025.
For the 11th to 20th biggest news websites in the US, combined traffic was down 20% compared to three years ago, 36% compared to two years ago and 14% in the past year.
The only growth in all three time periods was when looking at three titles compared to 2023 including the Associated Press, which relaunched its consumer-facing website in June 2023 and then saw a record 2024, which saw traffic up 28% in July this year versus July 2023. However it was 41% down (to 72.2 million visits) compared to where it was in July 2024 (121.4 million visits).
The Guardian was up 14% in the US in July this year (71.8 million visits) compared to July 2023 (63 million). The UK newspaper brand invested massively in the US starting in around 2022 and has more than doubled its US team since then.
The third newsbrand to have seen growth compared to three years ago was The Wall Street Journal, up 11% versus July 2023 to reach 67.6 million visits.
USA Today had a notably large rise in 2023/24 that peaked at 203.5 million visits in November 2024 before plummeting to 89.9 million by July this year.
Across the past three years, combined traffic to the 50 biggest news websites in the US peaked in July 2024 at 4.9 billion visits, having risen 23% from 4 billion a year earlier. In July this year, their combined traffic was 3.1 billion, down 37% from the peak two years ago.
It should be noted that the analysis is based on the 50 biggest news websites in this July – meaning some sites that were previously bigger but have lost more traffic may have fallen out of the list and are not included.
How search traffic has changed
Among the ten biggest newsbrands, collective organic search traffic was down 16% in the past year. Compared to two years ago it was down 31%, while on a three-year basis it was down 11%.
At seven of the ten biggest sites, search traffic peaked in 2024 and subsequently declined each year.
The biggest percentage drop since 2024 was at CNN, falling by 61% from 124.4 million monthly visits coming from organic search to 48.4 million.
The second biggest faller since 2024 was the New York Post, down 50% to 25.5 million monthly visits from organic search. The NY Post’s search traffic was marginally higher in 2023 than in 2024, at 51.2 million visits.
Search traffic to Substack URLs grew each year, totalling almost 300% over the three years. Yahoo Finance also grew each year, albeit only by 0.1% in the past year to 35.9 million visits from search.
Among the 11th to 20th biggest news websites, three newsbrands had more search traffic in July than they did in July 2023: The Guardian (up 7% to 25.7 million visits), Yahoo News (up 3% to 24.1 million) and The Wall Street Journal (up 4% to 10.2 million).
All ten brands were down compared to 2024 and Yahoo News was the only one to grow its search traffic in the past year (by 7%).
Combined, this group of publishers saw their total search traffic down 15% compared to 2023, 46% compared to 2024 and 17% in the past year.
Among the entire list of the 50 biggest news websites in the US, total organic search referrals were down 42% this year compared to two years ago.
The data also showed organic search made up a marginally smaller percentage of overall traffic referrals.
Among the 50 biggest news websites, search made up 31% of referrals on average in July 2023, 32% in 2024 and 2025, and then 30% in July this year.
Search made up a bigger percentage of referral traffic at 12 of the 20 biggest newsbrands in 2026 compared to three years ago.
Direct traffic, which has become a focus for many publishers hoping to reduce their reliance on search, was up as a percentage of total traffic at 11 out of the top 20 sites.
Overall the referral mix has not drastically changed at most publishers.
The percentage of total traffic coming from generative AI is still only 0.4% on average across the biggest 50 sites. At the biggest site, The New York Times, it was 0.1% last year and 0.2% in July 2026.
The only two sites that saw more than 1% of traffic come from the likes of ChatGPT and Claude in July 2026 were Reuters (1.7%) and The Hill (1.1%).
[Read more: How niche UK-based B2B brand became one of most cited in world by LLMs]
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