The news industry is literally going through a traffic crisis.
According to a new report, digital publishers have witnessed a crash in social traffic in recent years. Particularly, traffic from X (formerly Twitter) – a popular news source for social media users – has declined 70% since 2022 when Elon Musk acquired the company.
This comes on the back of other recent findings that traffic for news publishers has tanked globally year-on-year (November 2024-2025) both from Google search and Discover. While Search traffic is down 33%, Discover traffic has crashed 21%, according to Chartbeat data for more than 2,500 news sites compiled for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s annual Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 report.
A news report published on the website of the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations further said media managers expect upto 43% decline in referrals from search engines by 2029.
Dramatic fall in social traffic
Nieman Lab, a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, posted on its website that while the discussion in the industry circles may have largely focussed on Google search traffic, alarm bells are ringing on the social front too.
Publishers’ traffic from X/Twitter has declined from 660 million pageviews in Q2 2020 to just 110 million PVs in Q1 2026. This data is based on Chartbeat’s 1,026 publisher clients.
Other key social platforms are also sending lower amounts of traffic to news publishers. For example, publishers got 6,535 million PVs from Facebook users in Q2 2020. This has dropped to 1,981 million in Q1 2026.
The report says even if readers land after clicking through links on Facebook and Twitter, they are spending less time on news publishers’ websites.
For example, Facebook users’ engagement on news websites has dropped from 44.7 seconds in Q1 2019 to 29.8 seconds in Q1 2026. The time spent for Twitter/X users has dropped from 49.0 seconds to just 22.2 seconds over the same period.
Search Traffic decline
NewzDash founder and CEO John Shehata also analysed more than 400 news publishers’ Google web search traffic and said the same has declined from 51.10% in 2023 to just 27.42% in Q4 2025. Over the same period, Google Discover traffic has increased from 37.03% to 67.51%.
While this may appear as changing goalposts for news publishers, Shehata notes that Google Search standing remains critical for a news publisher as the same plays a critical role in ensuring stable visibility in the Discover feed.
What’s really happening?
What is now fast becoming clear is that Google Discover and AI-driven summaries are dominating news traffic. With the availability of AI overviews and AI Mode on Google Search, news and information consumption pattern has changed with users consuming news without clicking through to publishers’ sites.
Experts describe this as reduced friction for users wherein the desired information is almost always available in one screen without the need to click, leading to zero-click behaviour.
Google is fast becoming the all-in-one place where people consume content: be it news, sports scores, education results, flight bookings etc.