The studies we have thus seen from third parties have all said traffic from Google Search to websites has declined a lot since AI Overviews came out. But we have a new study from Chartbeat that says traffic to news publishers from Google (including Discover) has been stable over the past few years.
PressGazzete covered this and wrote, "New data from Chartbeat suggests that “search” as a source of total traffic to major news publishers has remained stable over the last year."
This is the first study that gives strength and data to what Google has been saying, that clicks are stable after Google introduced AI Overviews in Google Search.
There is one caveat, this data includes Google Discover, which technically is not Google Search.
This data looked at 565 US and UK news websites since January 2019. So it is not a small number of publishers. I do suspect most of these are largish publishers and not small ones like me.
"Search (including Google Discover) is still growing as a percentage of overall traffic referrals despite concerns since the arrival of Google’s AI Overviews in 2024 and AI Mode this year of a precipitous drop to traffic coming from search as people get the information they wanted without needing to click through to a website," they wrote.
Search referrals made up 15.52% of the total in January 2019, with a first peak in March 2020 of 20.62% and now 19.03% in July after a fairly consistent few months, it goes on to say. Google as a percentage of total search traffic has marginally increased – although total volume is up slightly.
Here is the chart:
But Google News is not looking as pretty - look at that stready decline:
It does say that Google, and not including Discover, continues to make up 96.2% of search traffic to the sites analysed by Chartbeat. This proportion has consistently been between 95.1% and 96.8% since January 2019. Other search engines included in the Chartbeat data include the likes of Yahoo and Bing.
The article goes into how social organic traffic declined a ton across Facebook, X and other platforms.
What do you think of this data? I mean, it goes against what most of us are seeing with the great decoupling and what the several other studies have shown. At least this gives Google something to point to?
Hat tip Glenn Gabe:
Chartbeat data based on 565 sites since 2019 -> Publisher traffic sources: Google steady but social and direct referrals are down
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 14, 2025
"New data from Chartbeat suggests that “search” as a source of total traffic to major news publishers has remained stable over the last year. But… pic.twitter.com/tnZbEk0Lty
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