According to Press Gazette’s analysis of Similarweb data covering July 2023 to July 2026, traffic to the biggest U.S. news websites rose into a 2024 peak and then fell sharply.
Combined monthly visits to the 50 largest U.S. news sites climbed from about 4 billion in July 2023 to a three-year high of 4.9 billion in July 2024 — a 23% increase. By July 2026 that total had dropped to 3.1 billion, down 37% from the peak. The ten largest sites in July 2026 were down 18% from three years earlier, 32% from July 2024, and 15% from a year earlier.
Four of those ten still posted three-year gains: The New York Times (up 0.48% to 406.3 million visits), People (up 10% to 126.6 million), the BBC (up 3% to 96.9 million), and Substack (up 179% to 95.9 million). Substack’s figure includes all publications hosted on its domain.
Sites ranked 11th to 20th were down 20% versus July 2023, 36% versus July 2024, and 14% over the past year. Compared with 2023, Associated Press was up 28%, The Guardian’s U.S. audience was up 14%, and The Wall Street Journal was up 11%. USA Today surged in 2023–24, peaking at 203.5 million visits in November 2024, then fell to 89.9 million by July 2026.
Search traffic followed the same arc. Across the top 10, organic search visits were down 11% over three years, 31% over two years, and 16% in the latest year. CNN’s search traffic fell 61% from its 2024 level. Search still accounted for about 30% of referrals in July 2026, little changed from 31% in 2023.
Generative AI referred only about 0.4% of traffic on average. Press Gazette attributed the post-2024 slump to Google’s AI Overviews rollout in the U.S. in May 2024, weaker social referrals, and audience shifts toward individual creators and AI chat tools. Monthly rankings through mid-2026 show the same pattern: most of the top 50 sites were down year over year, with consistent exceptions including Substack and, at times, Al Jazeera and The Hill.