Atlanta — If you are a U.S. news publisher, you likely know that your traffic from social media has fallen — the question is just how much.

Social analytics platform Chartbeat has some answers. Social’s share of traffic to the 700 U.S. news sites that are Chartbeat clients has dropped by a third since January 2023, from 6% then of all traffic then to 4% of all traffic now.

Search traffic, still dominated by Google search, has remained relatively steady during the period, Brad Streicher, sales director at Chartbeat, said in a panel at the Online News Association’s annual conference in Atlanta last week. Google Discover — the Google product offering personalized content recommendations via Google’s mobile apps — is increasingly becoming a top referrer, up 13% across Chartbeat clients since January 2023.

Google Discover remains a somewhat fuzzy product, panelists noted. It’s entirely mobile. Users find it primarily in the Google app or if they open a new tab in the Google Chrome app, but “Google seems to be experimenting with where to put it,” Streicher said.

Discover is “increasingly a very viable space for news coverage, including breaking news coverage,” Anne Look Thiam, head of audience development, global digital news, and streaming at BBC Studios, said. And Discover is now The Hill’s largest source of traffic referral, exceeding regular search, said Will Federman, The Hill’s VP of audience and content strategy.

Google’s own guidance on Discover is fairly sparse, and panelists — as well as others I spoke to at ONA — noted they’re experimenting with what works. The BBC is testing publishing at different times of day to see what’s most likely to hit Discover, having found the “window of performance” for content there is shorter than the window for content on Search. Federman said The Hill has found success in “localizing” story ideas: “taking a national story, finding a local piece to it, sometimes gets that Discover traffic.”

What doesn’t work in Discover: Many of the things publishers have been doing for Google Search. A “really strong SEO game” doesn’t translate to success on Discover, Chartbeat’s Streicher noted. “These are very distinct referral sources.”

Stories with inflammatory and hyperbolic headlines don’t seem to perform well, either. Google itself recommends that, to maximize their chances of appearing in Discover, publishers “use page titles that capture the essence of the content, but in a non-clickbait fashion,” and discourages “tactics that manipulate appeal by catering to morbid curiosity, titillation, or outrage.” (One ONA attendee mentioned his publisher has seen particular success from Google Discover with stories covering the findings of research studies.)

“We can kind of guess, a bit, when we’re going into planning something, what we think might be our Discover head out of that batch,” Thiam said. But within the BBC, “we manage expectations about what it is. We don’t pitch Discover. We don’t submit to Discover.”

“I think there is a playbook that’s starting to emerge, but it’s still very hazy,” Streicher said. “It’d be great to invest the time and resources like we do with SEO, but right now, I think it’s very much trying to figure out what headlines work, what framing works, what stories work, and seeing if you can replicate to the best of your ability — but know that may not always be the case. And when there’s a core update, you can probably throw that advice right out the window.”

Here are a few other stats Chartbeat shared in the panel:

Publishers’ traffic from Facebook has fallen by more than 40% since January 2023.

Reddit and news aggregator apps are increasingly driving pageviews, though they’re starting from small bases.