PR services, government websites and even betting companies are getting their content listed in the Top Stories box provided by Google for news-related searches.
USA Today was the domain most likely to appear in Google’s Top Stories box in the first half of 2024, according to data shared with Press Gazette for Google searches across the web.
Top Stories is the panel that appears at the top of a search result in Google when a news-oriented query is detected. It tends to feature five stories, with headlines, publication times and labels including logos of the publishers.
Gannett’s USA Today had a search visibility score of 4.16% for the period between 1 January and 30 June, according to news and publishing SEO company Newzdash which was commissioned by SEO expert Glen Allsopp at Detailed. The score is based on a dynamic set of keywords, which change every 15 minutes, and is the estimated percentage of clicks (traffic) a website receives from its rankings for a particular keyword or set of keywords.
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Yahoo had the second-highest visibility score, of 4.09%, meaning the syndicated versions of stories which original on other news websites are often the ones that get picked up in the Top Stories box.
The highest UK-based websites in the ranking were: The Guardian (12th position, visibility score of 1.86%), the BBC (15th place, 1.51%) and Mail Online (1.27%).
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The recently expanded rollout of Google’s AI Overviews, which presents AI-written answers at the top of some search queries, could potentially have an impact on the visibility of Top Stories but they are mostly not delivered in results relating to current news events.
Not all sites that appear in Top Stories are newsbrands. The new research and analysis by Detailed found that 704 of the 1,000 top sites for search visibility in the first half of this year were classified as established media brands.
A further 147 were classed as independent websites (many of which were nonetheless media brands such as Stereogum, The Conversation and The Wrap) but 129 were large brands like the websites of the NFL and Olympics and 20 were Government websites.
The list includes PR services like Cision’s PR Newswire (ranked 472nd out of 1000) and OpenPR (773nd) meaning companies are able to get their news into Top Stories that way if they are lucky.
Within only the top 50, Press Gazette considered that all but four were well-established media brands. Three were sports betting websites and one was the NBA’s own page.
The content categories from Newzdash analysed to make up the rankings were: Top Trends, National News, World, Business, Technology, Entertainment, Sports, Science and Health.
Newzdash checked around 45 million keywords between January and June. Its tool does so by checking trends based on specific countries every 15 minutes, then using Google mobile search results to get Top Stories and organic results data. See here for more information on the methodology explained by Allsopp and Newzdash founder John Shehata.
Newzdash estimates that 40-60% of organic search traffic comes from Top Stories - with the higher end coming for sites with more hard news than evergreen content.
Of the top 20 domains for the half-year by search visibility, The New York Times had the highest estimated traffic from Top Stories in July (10.5 million) followed by The Guardian (8.2 million). A comparison of estimated traffic from Top Stories for the entire six months was not available.
It is estimated, Detailed said, that Top Stories sends around 200 million clicks to the top 100 sites by visibility each month.
As Detailed pointed out, the list of the 1,000 top domains in Top Stories is dominated by several publishers. A fifth (19%) of sites in the full ranking were owned by five media companies: Tegna, Hearst, Vox Media, Nexstar and Gannett.
In addition, the top ten brands were behind 284 of the top 1,000 sites.
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