🌅 Publishers Fear the “Traffic Era” Is Coming To an End

SOURCE

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

WHAT TO KNOW

• Google traffic from organic search to over 2,500 news sites continued to fall in 2025, dropping 33% globally and 38% in the U.S. as AI overviews and chat responses continue to grab a larger share of the internet-query pie. The new report from the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford in the U.K. also found publishers aren’t all that surprised, expecting referrals from search engines to drop by 43% over the next three years as the “traffic era” that has sustained the industry since the advent of the internet comes to an end.

WHY IT MATTERS

• At the same time organic traffic is declining, referrals from AI overviews and chat responses are on the rise. However, the report found it’s not yet clear how much of the decrease in organic traffic is actually due to AI, as Google still delivers 500 times as many referrals as ChatGPT from search alone and 1,300 times as many when you include traffic from Google Discover. Referrals from ChatGPT represent just 0.02% of all referral traffic.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• Traffic from social media to news sites has also plummeted over the past two years, with referrals from X (formerly Twitter) falling by 46% and referrals from Facebook falling by 43%. In response, publishers say they’re planning to devote fewer resources to X (-52 percentage point difference between publishers saying they plan to devote “more” or “less” effort to the platform), Facebook (-23), and BlueSky (-11), while increasing their focus on YouTube (+74), TikTok (+56), and LinkedIn (+40).