The BBC has become the world’s top news website... by collapsing a little less than its competition
Press Gazette just published its annual look at the biggest news sites in the world across all languages; for the most part, it doesn’t make for particularly pretty reading.
The journalism industry publication’s latest update, which is based on estimates provided by Similarweb for May, found that 37 of the world’s 50 most visited news sites saw their reach shrink. Press Gazette highlighted that American outlets have been hit particularly hard by declining Google traffic compared to European counterparts, owing to the platform’s AI features rolling out earlier in the US.
Even the BBC, having climbed the rankings from last year to top the 2026 chart — reportedly in part thanks to Similarweb’s decision to combine the “.co.uk” and “.com” versions of the URL, given that the sites redirect to each other depending on the user’s location — showed a 1.9% decline from last year.
It’s become quite plain now that, in the world of online news publishing, you don’t really have to gain new readers and website visitors to shimmy your way up the standings — it’s now simply enough to shed slightly fewer readers than everyone else. The New York Times saw a 5% decline and Fox dropped 10%, but neither came close to CNN, which saw visits plummet 23% year on year.
One bright patch on the landscape? Substack.com, which broke into Press Gazette’s top 50 for the first time after rising 49.1% to clock nearly 165 million site visits this May, having already leapfrogged some of the industry’s more established names a while back.
It’s become quite plain now that, in the world of online news publishing, you don’t really have to gain new readers and website visitors to shimmy your way up the standings — it’s now simply enough to shed slightly fewer readers than everyone else. The New York Times saw a 5% decline and Fox dropped 10%, but neither came close to CNN, which saw visits plummet 23% year on year.
One bright patch on the landscape? Substack.com, which broke into Press Gazette’s top 50 for the first time after rising 49.1% to clock nearly 165 million site visits this May, having already leapfrogged some of the industry’s more established names a while back.
