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Google Search Decline Steepened To 40% YoY For Publishers via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

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Google Search Decline Steepened To 40% YoY For Publishers via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

A report finds Google Search and Discover declines got steeper for publishers, while direct, internal, and dark social grew.

Chartbeat reports a 40.2% year-over-year decline for Google Search across its publisher network from July 2025 to July 2026, in the analytics company’s 2026 Publisher Playbook. Its year-over-year figure for the year before was a 21.9% decline.

The report shows that Google Discover’s year-over-year decline increased from 6.6% in the first year to 34.3% in the second. This data, gathered over two years from Chartbeat’s client sites, skews toward news and media publishers. The playbook says “AI-generated search results and a shifting referral landscape put real pressure on audience acquisition.”

Back in March, I looked at Chartbeat data when Axios reported that small publishers lost 60% of their search referral traffic over two years. The playbook doesn’t break down that data by publisher size, though.

In July 2024, Google Search made up about 9% of all pageviews across the network, but by July 2026, it had decreased to 5%. The report calls this change a relative drop of nearly 46% over two years. At the same time, Discover’s share fell by 28.4%.

Overall, the network averaged 31.1 billion pageviews each month from January to July 2026, slightly down from about 32 billion in 2025, which the company considers a small decline.

01% of traffic, according to the playbook .



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