Around six in ten of the UK’s biggest news websites have seen a drop in their visibility in Google search results in 2025 so far.
Sistrix data shows 42 of 74 news websites analysed by Press Gazette are now seeing lower visibility in Google compared to ten months ago.
Google has carried out two major core algorithm update this year, one in March and one starting in June (scroll down for specific results from the second update). Press Gazette understands Discover traffic has been hit since then at multiple UK national titles.
Despite this just over half (29) of the 50 biggest news websites in the UK saw year-on-year growth in July, the month in which the core update rollout finished.
Sistrix’s Visibility Index measures how visible a website is in Google search results, assigning higher scores to sites that rank better in search results.
The score draws on organic (unpaid) search results and does not include Top Stories boxes, AI Overviews or the Discover news feed.
The news websites included in Press Gazette’s analysis are mainly based on those that make regular appearances in our ranking of the top 50 biggest newsbrands in the UK, with some select additions to represent a good cross-section of the industry.
[Read more: Google appears to prioritise global newsbrands over local ones for breaking news events]
By far the highest search visibility score among the news websites analysed was at The Guardian, with a score of 223.76 on Tuesday (6 October) – despite a 10% or 24.9 point drop since 30 December 2024.
The Guardian is also currently the biggest online newsbrand in the UK excluding the BBC in terms of UK reach, with a monthly audience of 21.6 million people in August (down 0.9% year on year).
Barry Adams, a specialised SEO consultant for news publishers at Polemic Digital, told Press Gazette why The Guardian’s visibility score is so much higher than any other news website.
He said the newsbrand “has a very broad scope in terms of the topics that they cover. It’s interesting to note that among the sections of the site that have the largest VI scores are film, music, books, lifeandstyle and culture. This shows that The Guardian isn’t just a news website, it’s a complete resource for content around life, media, and culture in all forms.
“The Guardian’s output in terms of volume, quality, and topical coverage is almost unmatched by any other publication. That has resulted in such a strong VI, with a dominant presence in search for topics that most rival publishers only pay basic lip service to.”
The second-highest ranked site was Money Saving Expert, with a score of 79.3 – up 2.8% or 2.2 points so far this year. MSE was the twelfth-biggest online newsbrand in the UK in August, with an audience of 13.6 million people (down 0.9% year on year).
The Independent was ranked higher than MSE at the start of this year but has suffered a 42.5% or 45.9 point drop in its visibility score to 62. The Independent was the second-biggest online newsbrand in the UK behind The Guardian in August, with an audience of 21.2 million (up 3.4% year on year).
Among the ten sites with the highest search visibility scores, six saw double-digit percentage drops.
The biggest drop was at Future-owned Techradar, down 48.1% or 30.3 points to a score of 32.7.
Also down were Forbes (down 33% or 15.1 points to 30.7) and the Daily Mail (by 30.5% or 13.7 points to 31.3).
The biggest growth among the top-hitters was at The Sun, up 21.1% or 4.9 points to a score of 28.1.
Within the top 20 sites by visibility score, the biggest growth was at Substack (covering publications based on the platform with substack.com in their URL) which has risen by 82.5% this year from a score of 7 to 12.8.
However a solid visibility score does not guarantee a newsbrand will get shown at the top of Google results.
The Manchester Evening News struggled to get surfaced last week as it reported on a fatal attack at a synagogue in the city last Thursday.
The MEN was 34th highest on our ranking of news websites by visibility score as of 6 October, with a score of 10. This was up 93.4% compared to the start of the year and versus July after the most recent core update, when it had a score of 5.6.
Who was hit by Google core update in June?
Between June and July, Google carried out what has been described as a “one of the larger core updates we’ve seen in some time”, believed to have benefitted some websites that had previously been hit by the platform’s helpful content update in 2023.
As well as the main Google search results pages and sub-sections like “featured snippets”, core updates can affect how publishers are surfaced in the Google Discover feed, which is served to users on Google’s native mobile apps and within its Android operating system. Some major news publishers are now heavily reliant on Discover traffic. This is not reflected in visibility data, however.
Most of the biggest news websites in the UK were negatively impacted by the latest core update, which began rolling out on 30 June and ended on 17 July.
Some 33 out of 74 websites analysed by Sistrix and Press Gazette saw double-digit percentage drops in visibility.
However, many of the big percentage drops were at sites with much smaller visibility scores, making any decline more pronounced. For example the biggest percentage drop was Reach regional Leicestershire Live down 76% or -0.9 in actual terms, to a visibility score of 0.3.
The second-biggest percentage decline was at GB News, down 59% or -3.4 in actual terms to a score of 2.4.
The biggest drop when looking at actual visibility score was at the Daily Mail, which saw a -14.2 change (down 27%) to 36.8. This means it has fallen further since the core update finished to its current score of 31.3.
However more than 60% of the Daily Mail’s search traffic is branded, meaning searches containing the brand name like “Daily Mail” or “Daily Mail Prince Harry”, and this is more resilient.
Reddit, which has been far more visible in Google search results since February 2024 when its owner struck a $60m annual deal which allowed Google to make use of its content to train AI models, had a visibility score much higher than any publisher at 1,625.9.
Update: This article originally included theweek.co.uk in the data, showing the most significant decline of the year. However Press Gazette now understands The Week moved to a .com domain in 2023 and this explains the drop. We have removed theweek.co.uk from the data.
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