Search slips, Discover delivers: Publishers navigate latest Google update

Referral traffic data from over 4,000 global sites shows Google Search and Discover traffic hasn’t changed that much this year, according to Chartbeat media researcher Cynthia Vu. There was a 9% decrease in Google Search pageviews from January 2025 to April 2025, and about a 6% increase in Google Discover traffic during that same period, according to Chartbeat’s analysis, which showed pageviews were flat from March to April 2025. 

Publishing execs told Digiday they haven’t seen a notable fluctuation in their Google referral traffic overall since Google’s core update in March, either. “It’s been fairly neutral across the board,” said Tom Critchlow, evp of audience growth at Raptive, which sells ads for about 6,000 independent sites.

“In the past, we’ve seen more meaningful impact [from Google core updates]” said an exec at a travel publisher, who requested anonymity.

They cited past Google updates such as a helpful content update in September 2023 — which was aimed at rewarding high-quality content in search results and demoting low-quality pages — and the product reviews update in February 2023 — which changed some of the rules around which reviews were promoted in search results pages. Both hurt some publishers’ sites visibility in search rankings and referral traffic.

The update this March “wasn’t anything too earth-shattering,” the travel publisher exec said.

Another publishing exec, who traded anonymity for candor, said they are more disappointed that Reddit continues to push down their sites’ search rankings, a growing and frustrating trend since Google started increasing the visibility of forum sites like Reddit in search results last year. “It hasn’t plateaued yet. Reddit is continuing to take more and more real estate [in the search engine results page],” they said.

Michael Hadgis, CRO at multicultural digital publisher Blavity, said search referrals have grown over the last two years despite Google’s core updates and integration of AI search features that have hurt Google click-through rates for some publishers. While Hadgis declined to say how much search referrals to Blavity’s sites had increased, he attributed this growth to Blavity’s work to update its content library and abide by Google’s guidelines on content quality, among other tactics.

But it’s not good news for everyone. One exec at a news and entertainment network of sites said that organic search referral traffic from Google to their network of sites is 13% year over year. However, how much of that can be attributed to the core update is unclear. The exec, who requested anonymity, believed that the average position of its company’s webpages on Google are down due to AI Overviews. Yet an uptick in Discover referral traffic has meant overall Google referrals were up 1% month-over-month between March and April and 6% year-over-year for the publisher, they said.

With AI Overviews and AI Mode threatening to carve deeper into Search traffic, Discover offers a faint but welcome flicker of hope. An uptick in pageviews from Google Discover to publishers’ sites is helping to offset some of the declines in click-throughs from search they have seen since the rollout of AI Overviews, execs said. 

For many publishers, Discover and Google Search drive a similar share of overall referral traffic, despite Discover being mobile-only until recently. Launched in 2018, Discover is a curated feed shown when users open a new tab in Chrome on mobile. Google started rolling out Discover on desktop to Australia and New Zealand last week. It has yet to appear in the U.S.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that publishers are seeing more Discover traffic while Search referrals shrink. A head of SEO at a lifestyle publisher believed that Google would likely “dial up” Discover traffic as it rolled out AI Mode so that traffic to publishers’ sites wouldn’t be as “negatively impacted.”

After all, Google faces a balancing act: staying competitive in AI while protecting the integrity of Search, its most profitable engine — which means it can’t afford to alienate publishers entirely.

“Google is compensating the loss of traffic in search by providing more Discover traffic and opening the Discover feeds to more and more users,” noted John Shehata, founder of SEO data platforms NewzDash and GDdash, and a former head of audience development strategy at Condé Nast.

Google Discover doesn’t show AI Overviews. Click-through rates in Discover were four times higher than Google Search rates in the first quarter of 2025, according to an analysis by Shehata. His data showed an 8% CTR in Google Discover, compared to 2% or less CTR in Search, he said.

“With less impressions, you get more clicks because the CTR is much higher,” Shehata said.

But Discover traffic remains unpredictable and volatile for publishers, according to the execs interviewed for this story. 

“A spoonful of sugar helps the bag of shit go down,” said a news publishing exec, who asked to speak anonymously. “Google Discover can lead to big clicks but… [those readers] are not paying to become subscribers… Discover has never been a long-term strategic thing [for us].” 

It’s also still too early to tell if the uptick in Discover traffic is sustainable or meaningful. “Desktop Discover is still too new to show measurable shifts, but we continue to monitor,” said Hadgis.