New data from Chartbeat suggests that “search” as a source of total traffic to major news publishers has remained stable over the last year.
This appears to chime with a Google statement earlier this month downplaying the impact of AI Overviews and AI Mode on publisher referrals.
However, this includes Google Discover – which has replaced search as the main source of Google traffic.
Social media has however sharply declined as a source of publisher traffic in recent years, as has direct traffic.
This comes despite a growing theme in the past two years of publishers setting out to grow the audience that comes to them directly to help future-proof in the face of AI search, unpredictable social media algorithms and changing audience habits.
Direct traffic is defined by audience data analytics tool Chartbeat as visitors that arrive directly on the website via typing in the URL or through a bookmark.
Across 565 US and UK news websites that are Chartbeat customers and have opted in to sharing their anonymised traffic data for aggregate research purposes, 16.09% of traffic came directly to homepages and other landing pages in January 2019.
This fell to an initial low of 12.45% in April 2020 before seeing growth over the next two years to 16.26%. However the proportion of direct traffic has largely fallen again since to 11.46% in July.
In January 2024, US-based consultant Matthew Scott Goldstein wrote that publishers needed to ditch their search addiction and build their direct audience. “Established brands with robust front-door traffic braced for impact have a distinct advantage, think Yahoo!, WSJ, NYT, Daily Mail, CNN, WaPo and Fox News as some examples,” he wrote.
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 as a percentage of total search traffic has marginally increased – although total volume is up slightly.
Google (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. Other search engines included in the Chartbeat data include the likes of Yahoo and Bing.
External traffic sources (people arriving via links on sites across the internet such as on other newsbrands or blogs) have seen a major jump as a proportion from 7.93% in January 2019 to 17.26%.
Internal traffic, defined as visitors arriving on a page via another page on the same site, has decreased as a proportion from 43.18% in January 2019 to 39.26%. Keeping users on the site for longer once they arrive has however become a key metric for many publishers.
Notably social referrals are down from providing 17.28% of traffic to news websites to 12.99% in July.
Facebook, although still dominant, is down alongside Twitter while Reddit and Instagram have seen growth.
Facebook traffic to the publishers included in the analysis is down 50% since the start of 2019 from 984.8 million referrals in January 2019 to 474.6 million.
However it is currently 29% higher when compared to its low point of the past few years of 368.6 million in December 2024.
Facebook referral traffic plummeted in recent years from a high of 1.5 billion at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. After an initial drop-off and another peak of 1.4 billion in August 2021, Facebook traffic saw a long decline as the platform deliberately prioritised posts from users over publisher pages.
This year Facebook traffic has seen an increase again after Meta said it “will take a more personalised approach to political content, so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can” across Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
However it remains at less than a third (32%) of that March 2020 peak.
Traffic from all other social media platforms remains a small fraction of what Facebook brings in.
Referral traffic from the second-largest social referrer, X (formerly Twitter), is down 75% since the start of 2019 from 128.7 million to 31.8 million.
X has also seen its overall traffic fall since Elon Musk took ownership. In the UK, the audience using X was down 12% in May compared to the same month in 2024, to 20.6 million.
Since October 2022, when Musk’s acquisition completed, X’s referrals to newsbrands have fallen by 65%.
Facebook’s Meta stablemate Instagram has seen its traffic to newsbrands increase by 15% since January 2019 to 14.9 million.
And Reddit has seen a large percentage jump and has overtaken Instagram, although it is still far behind Facebook and X for referrals.
Reddit’s referral traffic to newsbrands is up 220% from six million at the start of 2019 to 19.1 million in July.
Reddit has seen a massive audience increase overall (up 27% year on year in the UK to 31.2 million UK users in May) after it received a visibility boost in Google search results from February 2024. It struck a $60m annual deal which allowed Google to make use of its content to train AI models and has also since become the most-cited domain in AI chatbots.
Reddit referrals to newsbrands are up by 118% (from 14.6 million) since February 2024 alone.
Aggregators: Google News plummeted in late 2023 but still ahead
When looking at five of the main aggregators that news publishers see traffic coming from in the UK and US, Google News remains on top although it saw a sharp drop in late 2023 and has remained at a similar level ever since.
Some 107 million referrals to the newsbrands in the Chartbeat sample came from Google News in July 2025: about the same as January 2019 (108.7 million) but down 28% compared to the same month two years ago (149 million in July 2023).
Meanwhile Newsbreak and Smartnews (neither of which are available in the UK) both saw a sharp jump at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic but are now down 53% (to 35.6 million referrals) and 31% (to 48.1 million) respectively compared to March 2020.
[Read more: Smartnews launches new app to counter rage-bait and polarisation]
And Flipboard has seen a decline of 61% since January 2019 and of 71% since March 2020, to 21.9 million referrals in July.
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