Traffic to top 100 news sites falls from 70M to 47M monthly visits

According to Axios data, visits to the top 100 news sites dropped from a peak of over 70 million a month in July 2024 to just over 47 million in July 2026. The decline is tied to Google's AI Overviews and AI assistants summarizing news instead of sending users to publishers, with direct traffic down 25% over two years.

• Top 100 news sites fell from 70M monthly visits in July 2024 to 47M in July 2026
• Direct traffic to top 100 media sites dropped 25% over two years
• 40% of desktop visitors no longer scroll web pages
• AI chatbot referrals number in the hundreds of thousands vs tens of millions from search