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A recent study from Digital Phablet reveals that, contrary to earlier reports showing a significant decline in Google search traffic since the advent of AI Overviews, traffic to news publishers from Google—including Google Discover—has remained relatively steady over the past few years.
According to the research, data from Chartbeat indicates that search now accounts for a stable portion of overall traffic to major news outlets. This aligns with Google’s own assertions that clicks have remained consistent following the rollout of AI Overviews. It’s worth noting that the data encompasses 565 news websites in the US and the UK since January 2019, most of which are larger publishers rather than smaller outlets.
Despite concerns that AI Overviews and new AI features introduced in 2024 would cause a sharp decline in search traffic—particularly as users get answers directly within search results—the percentage of traffic coming from search sources, including Google Discover, has actually shown resilience. In January 2019, search referrals made up about 15.5% of total traffic, peaked around 20.6% in early 2020, and now settle near 19%. Though the volume has increased slightly, the dominance of Google remains consistent, with the platform accounting for over 96% of search referrals since 2019, excluding other engines like Bing and Yahoo.
However, Google News appears to tell a different story, with a clear and steady decline in traffic over the same period.
The analysis also highlights the shift in social media’s organic reach, which has decreased significantly across platforms like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter).
This new data challenges the narrative that search traffic is shrinking dramatically amid the rise of AI and integrated answer boxes. Instead, it provides evidence that search remains a substantial and stable driver for news site visits, giving Google a data-backed point to emphasize amid ongoing industry debates.
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