Google’s article suggestions now third-largest source of traffic, up 5,700 percent since 2017
Google’s mobile article recommendations are now the third-largest source of referral traffic to publisher sites, it has even outgrown Twitter.
“We’ve seen an approximately +5,700% increase from January 2017 (9.8 million pageviews) to September 2019 (573 million pageviews),” said Jill Nicholson from Chartbeat, the leading content intelligence platform for publishers.
“Year over year, we saw 869 million pageviews from Google Chrome Suggestions in 2017, 3.5 billion pageviews in 2018 and 4.2 billion pageviews through September of 2019. Meaning, even though we’re only two-thirds of the way through 2019, traffic from Google Chrome Suggestions has already surpassed the 2018 total,” said Nicholson.
The largest source of traffic is still Google Search (67.6 billion during the first nine months of 2019), followed by Facebook (30.2 billion), according to Chartbeat.

What are Google’s mobile article recommendations
Google’s mobile article recommendations are located in two places: first, called Google Chrome Suggestions you can see when you open a new tab in the mobile Chrome browser; second is Google Discover and it is located in the main Google app.
Chrome Suggestions shows only links to articles, Google Discover is a mix of content and features also videos, sports scores, movie trailers, event information, and more.
Discover content is shown to users based on their interests. “We’re not limited to what’s published today — if we think that a user would find earlier content interesting, then Discover will show it,” said Google.
The problem is that even links to disinformation pages can be found here. Google is actively promoting conspiracies and falsehoods.

How large is my traffic
You can see and analyze your traffic in the Google Search Console. “The new Discover report is shown to websites that have accumulated meaningful visibility in Discover, with the data shown back to March 2019,” said Google.
For example, Slovak news site Denník N has about 800,000 clicks per month and growing. (Slovakia has a population of 5.5 million people.) For comparison, this is roughly 40 times more than traffic from Instagram.
How to optimize content
There is no such optimization as we know from Google Search (SEO). “Google ranks Discover content algorithmically based on content quality and the strength of the match between page content and user interests,” said Google.
“The two best ways to boost the ranking and performance of your Discover content are (1) to post content that you think users would find interesting and (2) to use high-quality images in your content.”
Why this matters
Google now controls another important source of referral traffic. For now, publishers may be satisfied — they receive many new clicks for free and without any effort. This traffic could be much larger than traffic from Bing, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn together.
However, it will be interesting to see whether Google will use this traffic as an argument in a copyright fight with the media. Google is refusing to pay news companies for displaying their content and can claim that it already supports the media with huge referral traffic — and it is enough.
Read also: Apple should do for news in Safari on mobile what Google has done for news in Chrome (NiemanLab)
