The BBC takes the top spot in any language, but 30 out of the top 50 publishers take a hit.
Publishers and news sites are experiencing a decline in traffic across the world, with a number of the top news organisations experiencing a double digit decline in visits.
The BBC is ranked as the most-visited news site in any language, having seen 894.7m visits in May of 2026 – beating Japan’s Yahoo News (815.4m visits), Press Gazette reports. Coming in at third is Brazilian site Globo.com, which boasts 758.7m visits.
The US features the most of the sites in the top 50, claiming 13 platforms – including fourth place with the New York Times (592.6m). India follows, with eight sites, followed by Japan with four, and the UK, Germany, and Poland all have three features in the top three.
According to data from Similarweb, the Daily Mail saw the highest increase in traffic month on month, with a 8.5% increase to 209.9m – but the research notes that this is likely attributed to a switch from mailonline.co.uk to dailymail.com, with the traffic to both domains now combined.
The decline of traffic has affected eight out of 13 US sites from the top 50 in both month-on-month visits and year-on-year – although 30 of the top 50 sites saw month on month declines, affecting Al Jazeera most significantly (down 38%), India’s AVP Live (down 22%), and CNN (down 22%).
Traffic redirected
Google search referrals have seen a dramatic decline following the rise of AI overviews and AI chatbots, with as much as 60% of all Google searches in the US ending without a single click, rising to 93% when Google’s AI Mode is used, and 75% when mobile is used.
Google still dominates the search market with an over 90% market share, but ChatGPT is quickly gaining traction with over 2.5 billion prompts per day.
As such, the AI content marketing industry is projected to grow $5bn this year alone, and another $17bn by 2033.
This represents a serious concern for publishers and online sites that rely heavily on traffic for revenue, and for the ad industry which operates on the assumption of a (previously reliable) flow of visitors and viewers for click throughs and conversions.
ChatGPT and other LLMs are introducing new ways to advertise products within their platforms in a natural, conversational manner – but this will require careful consideration from both advertisers and the sites themselves.
