Only 10 of the 50 most-visited English-language news websites in the world drew more visits in October 2026 than in October 2025, according to Press Gazette's monthly ranking, published on November 11, 2026 and built on Similarweb estimates. The New York Times was the only one of the ten largest sites in the ranking to grow, with 684.7 million visits, up 11% on the year.

In Short

Press Gazette's latest ranking of the 50 biggest English-language news websites found that just 10 had more visits in October than a year earlier, and the New York Times was the only one in the top ten to grow. The heaviest losses fell on India-based publishers such as News18 and Hindustan Times, and on USA Today and Business Insider, all of which sell advertising against those visits. For anyone buying news inventory, the pool of visits on the largest English-language news sites is still shrinking year on year, with growth confined to a small group led by the New York Times, Euronews, Variety and Al Jazeera.

One grower in the top ten

Press Gazette's headline for the October edition put it plainly: "New York Times bucks traffic decline among top ten in October." The body of the ranking is more precise. "The New York Times was the only newsbrand to grow its traffic year on year among the top ten of the 50 biggest English-language news sites in the world in October," according to Press Gazette. Visits to the Times rose 11% to 684.7 million, and its month-on-month increase of 13% was the strongest among the ten largest sites.

By PPC Land's calculation from those two percentages, the site recorded roughly 606 million visits in September 2026 and about 617 million in October 2025. Neither figure appears in the ranking. Both are derived from rounded percentages and carry a margin of a few million visits either way.

Press Gazette tied the growth to the publisher's subscription business. The New York Times Company added 420,000 digital-only subscribers in its third quarter, taking its total to 13.8 million, and partly credited its coverage of the US midterm elections, according to Press Gazette. When the company reported those results on November 4, PPC Land noted that digital advertising revenue rose 12% to $109.9 million, below the company's own forecast, and that the 13.76 million total across print and digital included 13.22 million digital-only subscribers. Subscriptions and site visits are separate measures. Still, a paywalled publisher whose traffic and subscriber base are rising together sits in a different position from an ad-funded site that is losing visits.

Search may have played a part too. After Google's March 2026 core update finished rolling out on April 8, nytimes.com recorded the largest positive SISTRIX Visibility Index change in the United States, in data compiled by Steve Paine and shared by Barry Adams. Press Gazette's October write-up does not connect the Times' traffic to search, though, and a visibility index tracks ranking positions, not visits.

The other nine sites in the top ten did not grow year on year. The October text does not list them with their totals. Earlier editions give a sense of scale: in August 2026, MSN recorded 411.9 million visits and CNN 313.3 million, both down 25% year on year, while the BBC fell 19% month on month to 818.5 million after passing one billion visits in July for the first time in 18 months.

Ten out of fifty

"Only ten out of the top 50 newsbrands grew their traffic year on year in October," according to Press Gazette. That is a modest improvement on September, when seven grew and half of the 50 lost more than a fifth of their traffic. It remains well short of March 2026, when 17 sites grew year on year and 31 declined. In the August 2025 edition the picture was starker still: Substack, up 49% to 123.8 million visits, was the only site in the ranking with year-on-year growth.

Euronews led the growers. "Euronews saw the biggest increase in traffic compared to last year for the third consecutive month," the ranking states, with visits up 54% to 37.7 million. The broadcaster's lead is narrowing, however. It was up 98% in August, at 46.2 million, and 99% in September, at 44.8 million, and its October total was 16% below September's. By PPC Land's calculation, the 54% rise implies about 24.5 million visits in October 2025.

Variety, the entertainment trade title, grew 41% year on year to 46.3 million, and 21% on September. It entered the top 50 in July 2026 with 39.5 million visits, alongside The Hill and Euronews, replacing Bloomberg, HuffPost and the Express. Al Jazeera rose 40% to 68.1 million. Its traffic has swung sharply this year. Press Gazette recorded a 397% year-on-year increase in March 2026, to 210.8 million visits, after US and Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, then a 33% month-on-month drop in April and a 28% fall in August, to 66.7 million.

Press Gazette's October text names four of the ten growers: the Times, Euronews, Variety and Al Jazeera. The remaining six are not identified in the write-up.

India-based sites carry the steepest losses

Nine of the top 50 sites are based in India, and four of them were among the six biggest year-on-year decliners in October, according to Press Gazette. News18 fell 58% to 63.1 million visits. Hindustan Times dropped 50% to 73.9 million, Indian Express 42% to 65.8 million and India Today 40% to 55.4 million.

The combined effect is large. By PPC Land's calculation, the four sites drew 258.2 million visits in October 2026, against roughly 504 million implied for October 2025. That is about 246 million fewer visits in a year, a decline of close to half.

Hindustan Times shows how the slide has unfolded. The site recorded 135.8 million visits in April 2026, already down 50% year on year, then 94.3 million in July, 84.4 million in August, 76.9 million in September and 73.9 million in October. By PPC Land's arithmetic, that is a fall of about 46% in six months, on top of the losses already built into the April figure.

Google's ranking changes run through Press Gazette's account of the year. In the June 2026 edition, the eight sites with the worst month-on-month traffic falls were all based in India, and Press Gazette linked the wider decline that month to Google's May 2026 core update, which began rolling out on May 21. NDTV fell 33% on the month to 138.9 million. Earlier, during Google's December 2025 update, SISTRIX data showed hindustantimes.com's visibility index falling from above 6 points to below 2, with indiatimes.com and indianexpress.com also trending down.

Not every Indian site moved the same way. India.com posted the largest month-on-month rise in October, up 39% to 48.5 million, a month after falling 45% to 34.9 million. One India had the steepest month-on-month fall, down 40% to 61.2 million. Its path through 2026 has been erratic: in July it jumped 179% in a single month to 124 million visits, climbing from 44th to 15th place, and in September it was still up 44% year on year at 102.8 million. Press Gazette offered no explanation for either site's October movement.

USA Today and Business Insider

The other two sites among the six steepest decliners are American. USA Today fell 42% to 82.4 million visits, the third-largest year-on-year decline in the ranking, and was also down 7% on September. The 42% drop implies roughly 142 million visits in October 2025, by PPC Land's calculation.

The parent company's own figures point the same way, although they measure something different. USA TODAY Co. reported average monthly unique visitors across its network falling from 180 million in the first quarter of 2026 to 158 million in the second, before edging up to 161 million in the third. With its third-quarter results on November 5, the company reported digital advertising revenue down 13.9% to $75.0 million and a $100 million annualized cost reduction program. Similarweb's visit estimates for one domain and the company's unique visitor counts across all its properties cannot be compared directly.

Business Insider also fell 42%, to 39.2 million. It was down 45% year on year in the July 2026 edition. In May 2025, the publisher cut 21% of its staff, with a memo from its chief executive stating that 70% of the business had some degree of sensitivity to traffic.

A rebound on the month

The month-on-month picture was brighter than the annual one. Thirty-nine of the 50 sites grew between September and October, according to Press Gazette, compared with eight the month before. Reuters rose 35% to 92.8 million, and Variety and India.com posted the gains described above. The steepest month-on-month falls were One India's 40%, Euronews' 16% and USA Today's 7%.

Some of that rebound is calendar arithmetic. October has 31 days and September 30, so a site with constant daily traffic would show about 3.3% more visits in October on month length alone - a PPC Land observation, not one Press Gazette makes. September was also a weak base. Only eight sites grew that month, led by Newsweek (up 31%), CBC (up 9%) and CNBC (up 8% to 101 million), while India.com fell 45%, The Sun 23% to 41.7 million and NBC News 17% to 61.5 million.

Reuters' October jump came without an explanation in the ranking. The agency's site had a similar spike in March 2026, rising 46% month on month to 119.5 million, the same month Al Jazeera's traffic surged.

How the ranking is built

Press Gazette's figures are Similarweb estimates of website visits, not publishers' own analytics. According to Press Gazette's methodology note, Similarweb applies machine learning and modelling to statistically representative datasets drawn from direct measurement, where sites share first-party analytics, from contributory networks of device data, from partnerships and from public data extraction. The list starts from Similarweb's news and media category, which Press Gazette refines to exclude sites with a less journalistic focus.

Several caveats travel with the numbers. The metric is visits, not unique visitors or pageviews, so a reader who returns ten times in a month counts ten times. A note on the chart states that ABC News switched domains in early February, from abcnews.go.com to abcnews.com, "leading to a traffic spike," and that "Daily Mail figures may be impacted by domain switch from .co.uk to .com." The BBC series has also been revised: Similarweb changed its method to add the global bbc.co.uk figure to the US bbc.com figure, and Press Gazette notes that the BBC's January 2025 total may have double-counted visitors redirected between the two domains.

The ranking also counts Substack, a publishing platform rather than a single newsroom, among its news brands. Substack recorded 172.2 million visits in September 2026, up 37%, and had led the ranking's year-on-year growth for six consecutive months to December 2025. Its October figure is not in the write-up. PPC Land reported in October that the platform had set out three sponsorship formats that let brands pay to open paywalled posts, a sign of how it intends to sell that audience.

Year-on-year comparisons are also exposed to the news cycle. In the November 2025 edition, Fox News was down 36% and CNN 35% year on year, which Press Gazette put down to November 2024 containing the US presidential election. The November 2026 edition will compare a month that included the November 3 midterm elections with November 2025. It will also cover the first weeks of Google's November 2026 core update, which began rolling out on November 10, according to Google's Search Status Dashboard.

A year of pressure on news traffic

What does a 40-site shortfall reveal about where readers have gone? Not much on its own. The ranking does not attribute October's declines to any single cause, and Press Gazette's visit totals are not broken down into search, social, direct and AI referral traffic. Other measurements published over the past year point to the same pressure on open-web news, each with its own method.

PPC Land reported in August 2025 that 44 of the top 50 US news sites had fewer visits in July 2025 than a year earlier, in Press Gazette's US ranking. Chartbeat's quarterly data later showed search falling to 12% of North American publisher pageviews in the third quarter of 2026, from 21% a year earlier. In January 2026, a Reuters Institute survey of 280 executives across 51 countries found publishers expecting a further 43% decline in search traffic over three years, after Chartbeat recorded a 33% global fall in Google search traffic between November 2024 and November 2025, and 38% in the United States. The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report in June found that only 4% of AI chatbot users always or often click through to sources, against 19% for search and 17% for social media.

Within Google, the mix has shifted. A NewzDash analysis of more than 400 publishers found web search's share of their Google traffic falling from 51.10% in 2023 to 27.42% in the fourth quarter of 2025, while Google Discover rose from 37.03% to 67.51%. Discover volumes can swing with each update. During Google's December 2025 update, some news sites reported daily visitor drops of 70% to 85%, although those figures came from publishers' own accounts rather than measured panels.

Press Gazette's November 2025 edition carried one of the clearest descriptions of the mechanism from inside a top-50 publisher. Forbes chief executive Sherry Phillips told Press Gazette that the brand had lost traffic on the answer-style articles it was known for, such as who is the richest person in the world, because of Google's AI Overviews. Those are exactly the queries most exposed to zero-click search, where the answer sits on the results page. Forbes was down 53% year on year, at 85.5 million visits, in the August 2025 edition.

Publishers are turning the traffic argument into legal and regulatory filings. Digital Content Next said in a proposed amicus brief in the OpenAI copyright case that its members saw a 26% reduction in unique visitors between 2023 and 2025. In France, five publisher groups lodged a complaint with the European Commission over AI Overviews, feeding an investigation the Commission opened in December 2025.

Why it matters for the marketing community

Visits are the raw material of open-web news advertising. Each one carries display, video and native impressions, and the 50 sites in Press Gazette's ranking include several of the largest sellers of news inventory in the English-speaking world. When 40 of them fail to grow their traffic in a year, there are fewer impressions to sell at the same ad load, whether through programmatic auctions or direct-sold campaigns.

The growers named by Press Gazette are a mixed group: a subscription publisher, two international broadcasters and an entertainment trade title. Publisher results covered by PPC Land this autumn show the same split between subscription-led and ad-led businesses. The New York Times grew digital advertising by 12% in the third quarter while adding subscribers. USA TODAY Co., whose flagship site lost 42% of its visits in the Similarweb data, reported a 13.9% fall in digital advertising revenue and a $100 million cost program.

India stands out for its scale. For brands buying reach in India's English-language news market, four of the largest domains have roughly halved their visits in a year, according to the Similarweb estimates, and the monthly swings at India.com and One India make planning against any single month's figure unreliable.

The ranking does not settle causes. It cannot say how much of the decline comes from Google's ranking updates, how much from AI answers, and how much from readers moving to social video platforms and apps, which a count of website visits does not reflect. What it does show is direction. In the editions where Press Gazette gives a count, the number of top-50 sites growing year on year ranged from one in August 2025 to 17 in March 2026. In October it was 10.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Press Gazette, using Similarweb estimates, ranked the 50 most-visited English-language news websites in the world. The New York Times, Euronews, Variety and Al Jazeera are the named growers; News18, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, India Today, USA Today and Business Insider recorded the six steepest year-on-year declines.

What: Only 10 of the 50 sites had more visits in October 2026 than in October 2025. The New York Times was the only top-ten site to grow, up 11% to 684.7 million visits. India-based sites accounted for four of the six largest annual falls, led by News18 at minus 58%. Month on month, 39 sites grew, with India.com up 39% and Reuters up 35%.

When: Press Gazette published the ranking on November 11, 2026. The data covers October 2026, compared with September 2026 and October 2025.

Where: Worldwide visits to English-language news websites, as estimated by Similarweb, with nine of the 50 sites based in India.

Why: The ranking shows that visits to the largest English-language news sites are still falling year on year for most of the group, which reduces the advertising inventory those visits support. Press Gazette tied the New York Times' growth to its subscription gains and election coverage, and in earlier editions linked losses at India-based sites to Google's core updates. The ranking itself does not identify a single cause for October's declines.