Google Sending More Discover Traffic But Less Search Traffic To News Publishers

Google is sending news publishers a lot less traffic from Google Web Search but also a lot more traffic from Google Discover. A new report conducted by Newzdash analyzing 8.1 billion clicks across hundreds of news publishers using Google Search Console data compared 2023 to 2024 data.

John Shehata, the founder of Newzdash, posted the data on X saying, “We’ve just completed a massive analysis of 8.1 billion clicks across hundreds of news publishers, using Google Search Console data. Our Newzdash team at gddash.com crunched the numbers, and the results are eye-opening.”

He showed how Discover has a 14 point increase in traffic to those publisher it tracks, while Google Search had a 10 point decline in traffic to those publishers it tracks.

Here are those data points:

• Google Discover Increase: The share of traffic from Google Discover jumped from 41.6% to 55.6% of publishers’ total Google traffic – a 14% increase in proportion!
• Google Web Search Discover: Traditional web search now accounts for only 36% of publishers’ Google traffic, down from 46.5%.
• Other search types lose share: Google News, News, Image, and Video search all saw decreases in their proportion of traffic.

Google News traffic was down from 7.3% to 6.0% and so was news tab, image tab and video tab traffic.

Here is the chart:

“Important note: These percentages represent the share of traffic from each search type, not absolute traffic numbers. A larger share doesn’t necessarily mean more traffic overall – it indicates a shift in the relative importance of each channel,” John added.

Can you rely on Google Discover traffic from Google? I doubt it, so good luck.

Forum discussion at X.