Press Gazette reported on Tuesday, November 10, that more than two in three of the UK’s largest news publishers lost organic Google visibility across the past year, based on Sistrix data. Substack was the standout gainer, and the Daily Mail posted the sharpest fall after changing domains.
The numbers come from the Sistrix Visibility Index, one benchmark score where stronger rankings earn higher values. Sistrix measures only organic (unpaid) results. It leaves out Top Stories boxes, AI Overviews, and the Discover feed, which are the surfaces where news publishers often get their traffic.
That caveat matters. The data describes blue-link rankings, not total exposure in Google. A publisher could hold steady in Top Stories and still show a lower score here, so the index understates or overstates real-world traffic change in ways Press Gazette’s report does not quantify.
Among the declines, BBC News fell from 41.8 to 20.35. The Guardian slipped from 236.88 to 216.86. The New York Times dropped from 58.09 to 38.23. The Daily Mail’s case is different in kind. It moved to dailymail.com in April, and on October 21 that domain scored 9.99, against 32.17 for dailymail.co.uk a year earlier.
Barry Adams, a news SEO consultant at Polemic Digital, told Press Gazette the Mail migration was still a success. He said it was “high-risk” because “inclusion in Google’s news ecosystem is tied to the publisher’s hostname,” and that the Mail appears to have fallen from Top Stories and Google News before returning. In his words: “Usually, it takes up to two years to get back into Top Stories, whereas the Mail did it in months.”
For the BBC, Guardian, and Times declines, Adams offered an explanation, and it is his view rather than a confirmed Google statement. He said the changes were “likely due to Google’s focus on greater diversity in its results,” adding: “It’s not that these sites did anything wrong, but that Google chose to allow smaller sites to also rank in its results. Since search is now a zero-sum game, small sites winning means big sites lose.” Google has not confirmed that mechanism, and the Sistrix data alone cannot isolate it from other changes.
Those other changes were numerous. Press Gazette notes that Google shipped a core update, a Discover update favoring local and expert material, and four spam-focused updates in the period. Any of them could account for part of the movement, which makes a single-cause reading hard to defend.
On the winning side, Substack’s score rose from 13.48 on October 20, 2025, to 27.94 on October 21, 2026. Adams credited its growth in creators plus built-in SEO capabilities. Money Saving Expert moved from 81.82 to 94.14, and The Times rose from 12.58 to 17.78.
The report also flags a trade-off created by AI Overviews. Top Stories carousels now appear inside them, which raises publisher visibility in those summaries. Press Gazette reports the carousels appeared soon after the UK competition regulator, the CMA, required Google to let sites opt out of AI Overviews. A publisher that opts out may therefore also give up those Top Stories placements.
The pattern fits a reading in which established brand authority protects a site less than it once did. Even so, the evidence here is one vendor’s index over one year, and it excludes the news-specific surfaces.
News and publisher teams should compare their own Search Console data against Top Stories and AI Overviews exposure before attributing any drop to a ranking loss. Anyone weighing an AI Overviews opt-out should model the lost carousel visibility first.
Press Gazette, “Most major UK news publishers saw Google search visibility fall in 2026” by Charlotte Tobitt, published November 10, 2026, reporting Sistrix data.
