Google search traffic to news sites drops one-third

News websites around the world are getting far fewer visitors from Google searches than they did a year ago, new numbers show.

A company called Chartbeat looked at traffic numbers from 2,756 news websites worldwide, including 797 in the United States. The results show Google search traffic fell 33% globally and 38% in America over the past year, according to a report shared by the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

AI overviews may be driving the decline

A big part of this decline came after Google started using AI Overview search results. These computer-generated answers appear at the top of search pages and give users several paragraphs of information. People often need to click extra times just to find links to the original sources Google used for those answers.

The drop is much worse than what another industry group found. Digital Context Next said in August that Google search traffic to their member websites went down about 10%.

Nic Newman works as a senior research associate at the Reuters Institute. He said experts are not sure how much of the traffic loss connects directly to the AI overviews. He also noted that different types of news sites may see different results. Charts tracking US traffic actually showed increases for several months after Google launched the AI search feature.

Newman explained that Google has mostly kept AI overviews away from hard news topics, possibly because the system sometimes creates false information called hallucinations. Websites focused on lifestyle content like weather forecasts, television schedules, or horoscopes appear more likely to lose traffic.

Google responded by questioning the findings. The company sent a statement saying their own numbers do not match the sharp declines described in the report. Google raised concerns about which websites Chartbeat chose to study and mentioned an August report from the same company that showed stable search traffic to news sites.

Google also pointed out that the study left out traffic numbers from Google News, a detail mentioned in small print under each chart. The company highlighted recent changes, including a new feature letting users select Preferred Sources in Google News and efforts to make links more visible in AI-generated results.

Social media traffic also falling sharply

The Chartbeat information reveals another problem area. Traffic from Google Discover dropped 21% worldwide and 29% in the United States. Google Discover shows suggested links when Android phone users swipe from left to right on their screens. This matters because Google Discover now sends more visitors to news sites than regular Google searches do. Chartbeat found that Discover accounts for 13% of referral traffic globally, compared to just 7.3% from Google search.

Social media platforms are also sending fewer readers to news websites. Since May 2023, traffic from Facebook has dropped 43% worldwide and 35% in America. Traffic from X fell even faster, declining 46% globally and 45% in the United States.

These numbers paint a difficult picture for newsrooms that depend on outside sources to bring readers to their websites.

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