CNN’s organic search traffic fell from 124.4 million monthly visits in July 2024 to 48.4 million in July 2026 — a 61% drop and the steepest decline among the ten biggest U.S. news websites.
That comes from a three-year Press Gazette analysis of monthly visits to the 50 largest U.S. news sites, using Similarweb data from July 2023 through July 2026. Combined traffic across the 50 sites peaked at 4.9 billion visits in July 2024. This July, it was 3.1 billion, down 37%.
Among the ten biggest sites in the current ranking, traffic was down 32% from July 2024 and 15% from a year earlier. That 32% figure applies to those ten sites, not US news websites generally.
The peak came shortly after Google began rolling out AI Overviews to all U.S. users in May 2024. Press Gazette’s data show the timing, but do not establish that AI Overviews caused the decline.
Not every outlet lost ground over the full three-year period. The New York Times was essentially flat, up 0.48% to 406.3 million visits. People rose 10% to 126.6 million, and the BBC gained 3% to 96.9 million. Traffic to Substack URLs jumped 179% to 95.9 million, while search traffic to the platform rose nearly 300%.
USA Today’s traffic peaked at 203.5 million visits in November 2024, then fell to 89.9 million by July 2026. Separately, its parent company this month hired Palantir to analyze first-party audience data. USA Today Co. executives have attributed recent traffic declines to lower referrals from traditional search.
The Associated Press was still 28% above July 2023 after a relaunch of its consumer site, but down 41% from July 2024, to 72.2 million visits.
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AI referrals remain small by comparison. Generative AI accounted for an average of 0.4% of total traffic across the current top 50 sites. At the New York Times, it was 0.2%. Reuters reached 1.7% and The Hill 1.1%.
Organic search traffic across the top 50, meanwhile, was down 42% from July 2024. Google’s documentation on AI features says the same basic SEO practices still apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, with no special optimization required.
The traffic mix changed less dramatically than the totals. Search accounted for about 31% of traffic on average in July 2023 and 30% this July. Direct traffic increased as a share at 11 of the top 20 sites.
Publishers are also experimenting beyond referral traffic. Time is selling ads inside markdown pages aimed at AI crawlers, while Cloudflare converts webpages to markdown for AI agents when requested. Those projects are separate from Press Gazette’s analysis.
There is one important caveat. Press Gazette built its list from the 50 biggest sites as of July 2026, meaning sites that fell out of that group are excluded. The analysis describes the current top 50 looking backward; it does not measure the entire U.S. news sector.
The takeaway is narrower. The biggest news sites in today’s ranking are drawing substantially less traffic than they did around the 2024 peak, while generative AI referrals remain a small part of the audience mix.
