• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

There has been a fundamental shift in how people discover news content through Google's platforms.

Google Web Search traffic to news publishers fell 51% in 2023 and was down 32.21% in 2024.

The next set of data looked at quarterly rates, showing a decline to 28.23% in the first quarter of 2024 followed by a drop to 27% in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Discover -- Google’s recommendation feed that is mostly accessed on mobile devices -- is the only Google platform analyzed by NewzDash that nearly doubled its traffic share.

It now accounts for 67.51% of Google traffic to news organizations, according to analysis of more than 400 news publishers worldwide. The data was released Tuesday by NewzDash CEO John Shehata.

Web search has lost nearly half its share in just two years, dropping 23.68 percentage points during the period analyzed.

Discover, which seems to have become a major path to how people discover news, rose from 37% in 2023, 60% in 2024, and 67.51% by the fourth quarter of 2025, Shehata wrote on LinkedIn.

Shehata, who has worked for USA Today and Condé Nast, in a LinkedIn post called the move “the Great Flip,” as traditional web search continues to fall from 51.10% to 27.42% over the same period.

“While Google previously announced plans to bring Discover to the desktop home page to expand its reach, a widespread global rollout has not yet been seen as of December 2025,” Shehata wrote. “Limited testing has been spotted in specific regions like Australia and New Zealand, [but] Google has not provided specific dates for a full-scale launch.”

Shehata points out that the data represents the percentage share of total Google mobile traffic, not absolute click volumes.

This reflects a shift in distribution in terms of how readers find data, and publishers should pay attention -- although it may not indicate growth or decline for individual publishers.

Web traffic figures also exclude News, Image, and Video tabs.