Search referral traffic is collapsing unevenly, and small publishers are hit hardest

The numbers now come with a size breakdown, and the breakdown is the story. Chartbeat tracks traffic across thousands of client sites. It segmented its network and found that small publishers, those averaging 1,000 to 10,000 daily page views, lost 60% of their search referral traffic over two years. Mid-sized publishers lost 47%. Large publishers, over 100,000 daily page views, lost 22%.

Page views from Google Search fell 34% between December 2024 and December 2025, per the same data. Google Discover, the other top referral source, fell 15% over the same period.

That divergence matters because it inverts the usual pattern of platform disruption. Big newsrooms have direct traffic, apps, email lists, licensing deals and legal teams. Small ones have search. Chris Duncan, a former News UK and Bauer Media executive who now runs the consultancy Seedelta, described the squeeze to the Guardian as a pincer movement. Content is disappearing into AI products without serious remuneration, he said, while AI summaries remove the need to click through at all. "It is an existential crisis," he said.

The aggregate figures hid the worst of it

The aggregate decline has been reported for months. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism surveyed 280 media leaders across 51 countries. It found executives expect search engine referrals to fall 43% over three years. Google search traffic to news sites was already down 33% globally, according to Chartbeat data for more than 2,500 sites cited in that report, and higher in the US. Google's AI Overviews sat at the top of about 10% of US search results at the time.

Chartbeat's size segmentation, reported by Axios in March, showed the losses were concentrated at the bottom rather than spread evenly. "Most reporting on search traffic declines has treated publishers as a single group," Search Engine Journal noted when it covered the data. "For anyone working with smaller publishers, these numbers should change the conversation."

One detail complicates the simple replacement story. ChatGPT referrals grew more than 200% over the two-year window, but chatbots still account for less than 1% of all publisher page view referrals. Growth in chatbot traffic has not come close to replacing what search lost. News and media sites get the highest total page views from AI chatbot referrals but the lowest engagement per article. Axios said this suggests readers use news citations for quick fact-checks rather than deeper reading. Utilitarian sites, health advice and gardening tips among them, see fewer referrals but more page views per article.

Publishers are weighing the nuclear option

The Financial Times saw a "pretty sudden and sustained" decline of 25% to 30% in traffic arriving from search engines, chief executive Jon Slade said at a media conference, according to the Guardian. DMG Media told the Competition and Markets Authority that AI Overviews had fuelled a drop in click-through traffic to its sites of as much as 89%.

Some publishers are now considering cutting Google off entirely. USA Today Co., which is suing Google over an alleged ad-tech monopoly, may turn off Google's access if search traffic keeps falling. "It's time to take a stand and say enough is enough," chief executive Mike Reed told the Wall Street Journal. Reddit is reevaluating its $60m-per-year deal with Google after traffic declines, and Politico and Reuters are both considering limiting Google bot access and putting up registration walls, the Journal reported. People Inc. chief executive Neil Vogel told the paper that "turning [Google] off and blocking them entirely is 100% on the table."

Google disputes the framing. Liz Reid, the company's head of search, wrote in a blogpost that AI in search was "driving more queries and quality clicks." She said third-party reports suggesting dramatic aggregate declines were often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that predate the AI features. She did concede that shifting user trends were resulting in decreased traffic to some sites and increased traffic to others.

The Economist has been "actively discussing" opting out of AI search, though its vice-president of generative AI told the Journal that leaving Google entirely is not an option: "traffic can be choppy and declining, but traffic is still traffic."