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

All Paid Media PPC News Social MediaAdvertising Video Advertising Columns Ask A PPC ExpertNEW PPC Pulse Guide AI Max Invalid Traffic Doubled, Weeks Before Black Friday Invalid traffic on AI Max search doubled to 5.28%. Get the channel-by-channel retail benchmarks before Black Friday. Digital Marketing All Digital Marketing Analytics & Data Ecommerce Lead Generation Content Marketing Social Platforms Google YouTube Reddit LinkedIn TikTokNEW WordPress Other CMS Platforms Guide AI Max Invalid Traffic Doubled, Weeks Before Black Friday Invalid traffic on AI Max search doubled to 5.28%. Get the channel-by-channel retail benchmarks before Black Friday. SEJ Live Webinars Rundowns PodcastNEW Ebooks All Resources Ebook State Of Search 2027 Where search leaders are putting 2027 budget, plus the AI visibility scorecard that replaces session reporting. A report finds Google Search and Discover declines got steeper for publishers, while direct, internal, and dark social grew. SEJ STAFF Matt G. Southern September 24, 2026 ⋅ 4 min read SEJ STAFF Matt G. Southern Senior News Writer at Search Engine Journal Bio Follow 2.0K READS 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. AI referrals grew 8x over two years and made up 0.01% of traffic, according to the playbook. The report adds that “the shape of the data shows AI referrals declining across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini in 2026.” ChatGPT is the most effective driver of traffic among AI providers, according to the report. The company also says “generic, easily-summarized content is the most exposed” to AI answers that don’t send a click, while original reporting is harder for AI to replace. Between July 2024 and July 2026, the share of network pageviews from dark social, direct, and internal traffic increased. Dark social, described in the playbook as links shared via texts, DMs, and private channels, grew from 7.1% to 11.3%. Direct traffic expanded from 13.5% to 15.9%, while internal traffic rose from 37.9% to 40.4%. During this period, pageviews from loyal readers remained relatively stable. Chartbeat defines loyal visitors as those who visited a site on at least eight of the last 16 days. Their average monthly pageviews slightly increased from 14.98 billion in 2024 to 15.02 billion in 2026. However, returning readers declined by 8%, and new readers dropped by 14%. The report says loyal readers “are a major reason why overall pageviews haven’t seen a major decline.” The playbook doesn’t specify whether its year-over-year declines refer to the number of pageviews from each channel or each channel’s proportion of pageviews. Its two-year figures represent shares, but the report doesn’t clarify how these relate to the annual declines. The 0.01% AI figure is hard to compare with the company’s previous data. In March, Axios reported that chatbots accounted for less than 1% of all publisher page view referrals. The playbook gives AI referrals as 0.01% of traffic and doesn’t explain how the two figures relate. The report doesn’t include a site count for either year. Chartbeat sells analytics tools to publishers, and the playbook concludes with an invitation to request a demo. Across Chartbeat’s network, the decline in Google Search was greater in the second year compared to the first, and the same trend applied to Discover as well. You can compare your own July-to-July trend for Google Search and Discover with these insights. Just keep in mind that the network leans toward news sites. Chartbeat describes internal, direct, and dark social traffic, the channels that grew, as “much more similar to an owned audience” than search and social, and as channels media companies have “greater control over.” The playbook recommends that publishers “treat SEO as just one channel among several, while moving resources to developing audiences your organization can more closely influence.” When it calls this year’s pageview decline slight, it notes that the U.S. midterm elections in November are still ahead. As of Sept. 23, Q2 2026 is the latest of Chartbeat’s quarterly audience reports, and the playbook doesn’t say when its July-to-July Search and Discover figures will next be updated. Add SEJ as a preferred source on Google Read Full Bio SEJ STAFF Matt G. Southern Senior News Writer at Search Engine Journal Follow on YouTube. Matt G. Southern is the Senior News Writer at Search Engine Journal, where he’s covered Google, SEO, ... Breaking news and insights to help you lead search strategies. The Big Disconnect: Charting The Growing Disconnect Between Google And SEOs Stop Focusing On Google, It's Time to Focus On Being Visible Google SGE Organic Traffic Impact Divided By Verticals [Data Study] The AI Search & SEO News That Matters Breaking news and insights to help you lead search strategies. Breaking news and insights to help you lead search strategies. In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses -- and careers.

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Source: Search Engine Journal

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