As publishers consider the effects of AI on search — watching their own site analytics, hearing others’ stories, reading the statistics that at times tell multiple sides of the same story — another study has come out that appears to be saying, well, it might be much ado about nothing.
“New data from Chartbeat suggests that ‘search’ as a source of total traffic to major news publishers has remained stable over the last year,” writes Press Gazette’s Charlotte Tobitt of a study that looked at more than six years of traffic for just 565 news sites. “However, this includes Google Discover — which has replaced search as the main source of Google traffic.”
Chartbeat found that search referrals accounted for 19.03% of total traffic in July, relatively steady from a March 2020 peak of 20.62% and up from the 15.52% tracked in January 2019.
(Source: Chartbeat, via Press Gazette)
“Search (including Google Discover) is still growing as a percentage of overall traffic referrals,” writes Tobitt, “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.”
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