This Media Briefing covers the latest in media trends for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Thursday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →
In this week’s Media Briefing, some publishers share that referral traffic from Google Search and Discover are on the decline, following similar patterns to the social referral declines this year.
It’s been well reported that publishers are seeing less and less referral traffic come from social media platforms, as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok aim to keep their users on their platforms for as long as possible.
However, some publishers are voicing concerns that referral traffic from Google is also slipping, particularly for commerce content, though not limited to that category. Two publishers told Digiday they’ve seen reductions in Google referrals as high as 60-70% for a few of their sites, while other sites are flat or slightly up year over year.
“The entire media sector is down in terms of their audience size… We know that there’s been big changes on the social media front… but we certainly have seen a decrease in traffic from Google,” said a media executive from a digital portfolio publisher who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
A Google spokesperson told Digiday in a written statement, “We consistently improve our systems so we can continue to show relevant and helpful results. None of our updates target specific pages or sites, including publishers.”
On the whole, though, third-party audience measurement companies like Chartbeat and Similarweb, reported that referral traffic from Google is flat year over year between October 2022 to October 2023 (the most recent data available).
As a percentage of total external referral traffic going to about 2,000 publisher sites that Chartbeat measures, Google’s overall representation did decrease marginally year over year from an average of about 36.6% in October 2022 to 35.7% in October 2023, per a company spokesperson. Chartbeat measures Google Discover as part of Google Search.
Meanwhile, Similarweb — which tracked Google referral traffic to the 100 top news and media domains in the U.S., including the AP News, Reader’s Digest, Vogue and The Washington Post — saw a 2 percentage point increase in the average monthly referral traffic from Google between October 2022 to October 2023. On average, the publishers included in Similarweb’s data set received 32.8% of their external traffic from Google in October 2022 and a year later, that number rose to 34.7%, according to data shared with Digiday.
Of course there were some outliers in the list, including Reader’s Digest, which saw a decrease in Google’s share of referral traffic from 66% to 51.1% year over year during that time period. Trusted Media Brands declined to speak with Digiday for this story.
“It’s all over the board. I have [publisher clients] that have seen decreases of greater than 60%. I have some that are only off by 15-20%. And if you stack the sites up next to each other,