Most publicly available data shows Google search traffic to publishers – from huge news brands to blogs – declining across the board.
Websites that have traditionally focused on scale, often built with the aid of SEO, appear to be among the hardest hit in the recent algorithm updates.
And there’s no sign of the decline stopping there as Google look set to roll out Search Generative Experience (SGE) as soon as May 14, 2024 (not confirmed).
This hasn’t been helped by the drastic decline in traffic to websites from social media platforms, mainly Facebook, which has strategically moved away from sending clicks to websites by changing their algorithms.
Facebook want to keep their users on their platform and can you blame them?
User behaviour and how people consume content has also changed over the past five years and publishers are rightly concerned about where the future of their traffic comes from.
Algorithms are collectively moving towards serving users content based on browsing history and interaction… and they’ve become good at it.
The future of traffic for publishers
TRAFCK believe the answer is Google Discover – Google’s personalized content feed that surfaces articles and videos based on a user’s interests and browsing history.
Google Discover is available on the Google app or mobile browser and aims to deliver relevant content to users without them actively searching.
For example, if you’re planning a trip to New York, Discover will serve you with relevant travel content and videos from relevant publications.
Google Discover aims to provide a more personalised experience as opposed to traditional search.
It uses machine learning algorithms to analyse a user’s search history, location and engagement to understand their interests.
The feed is constantly updated with articles and videos.
Users can feedback by following or unfollowing topics, and choosing not to see results from specific publishers.
Discover has seen a rapid increase in user adoption and is now believed to be used by over 1 billion users every month.
For some websites, Google Discover accounts for over 30% of their total website traffic – surpassing organic search traffic in recent months.
Google continues to invest heavily in Discover and is continuing to expand its capabilities, such as integrating more multimedia formats like Web Stories.
We believe this will increase Discover’s importance for website traffic over time.
Google has made significant improvements to Discover over the last year and we especially noticed improvements to its algorithm after the August core update in 2023.
We believe this was then further improved in the October and November 2023 core updates.
The growth of Discover aligns with Google’s broader move away from just being a search engine to becoming a content discovery platform that can anticipate user interests.
TRAFCK’S take
Google, and other search engines alike, have become more unreliable and the search engine results page (SERP) has become full of sponsored posts and ad-filled blogs.
This has been one of the main reasons for the change in user behaviour and the growth of personalised recommendation algorithms like TikTok and Google Discover.
If Google does roll out SGE on May 14, websites could see a decline in organic search traffic by 60%.
Moving towards Google’s content discovery platform presents a huge opportunity for websites – who largely don’t optimise for it currently.
TRAFCK are the industry-leading expert when it comes to Google Discover. We drove over one billion Discover clicks to a single site in the US last year.
Contact us for more information: hi@trafck.co.uk.