There is a clear wipe-out taking place among news sites, as British figures show. AI search is siphoning off so much traffic that the top 20 news sites in England lost 26% of their traffic over the past year.
Compared to last month, the weighted decline amounts to 8%, according to figures from Press Gazette. The media outlet examined Ipsos data to get an idea of how visits to news sites have degraded.
That paints a devastating, though not unexpected, picture. Among the top 20 sites studied, not a single one gained traffic in the past 12 months.
Across the entire English-language market the picture is no different. In the US there is a weighted annual decline of 13%. Month-on-month, that figure is 8%.
According to the most recent data from Similarweb, more than a fifth of the fifty most visited English-language news websites in the world saw a drop in visitor numbers in May 2026 of 20% or more compared to a year earlier. The majority recorded at least a 10% decline.
The decline has been attributed to the rise of AI-generated overviews where users are presented with bare facts on search results, reducing the appeal of clickbait headlines and other features such as slide shows that often increased readers’ time on site.
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