The Road to Loyalty: A Q&A with Jill Nicholson on Navigating Traffic Shifts in 2026

Following our recent webinar, Navigating the New Traffic Landscape, we wanted to dig deeper into some of the questions submitted by attendees. Chartbeat, Inc.’s CMO, Jill Nicholson, shares her perspective on shifting referral patterns and how publishers can build something more durable than temporary traffic: true audience loyalty.

Having worked with media companies for more than a decade, Nicholson has a rare vantage point — a real-time view into how audiences behave across thousands of media sites.

Where the Traffic Is Going

Google Search and Discover traffic is down about 30% year over year, but overall pageviews are down only about 5%. How are publishers successfully bridging that gap?

While top-line traffic across the industry has faced headwinds from search declines, publishers are finding that overall performance is holding much steadier than search numbers alone suggest. When we look at other traffic sources individually, they may seem relatively minor. But collectively, some account for much more traffic than you might expect.

For instance, year-over-year growth in internal traffic is significant because of the sheer volume of pageviews generated by clicks within the same website. On top of that, we’re seeing real growth in dark social.

Dark social is traffic where the browser doesn’t pass referral information. But when that happens on an article page, we know the link came from somewhere because no human being randomly types in a complex article URL. This is typically email, messaging apps, and text messages.

In Chartbeat, my total social pageviews are much higher than the sum of the individual networks. What’s going on there?

That discrepancy happens because untracked shares and links where browsers fail to pass referral info fall into an aggregate “dark social bucket.”

Because we can’t always identify the source of that traffic through standard browser referrers, publishers should use a strong UTM strategy. If a reader clicks a custom share button on your site, such as a WhatsApp share button, that data can be passed through properly.

A robust UTM strategy helps you distinguish your own publisher newsletters from organic, peer-to-peer sharing so you can get a clearer picture of your audience.

When you look at dark social, remember that it tends to drive incredibly high-quality traffic, with much higher engagement times. Think about all the other things we share in everyday life outside of news. If I see a product I want to buy, it’s incredibly easy to share it with a friend for feedback.

Publishers need to look at their own platforms and ask how much friction there is for someone who wants to share an article.

Removing that friction is well worth the effort.

When Google Discover Suddenly Drops

What advice would you give to a site that historically received steady Discover traffic but has seen it abruptly collapse in recent months?

When we see a sudden drop, we ask three questions: Did the platform change? Did our strategy change? Or did audience behavior change?

When a traffic source abruptly changes patterns, it can indicate an algorithmic test or change by the platform. Toward the end of 2025, we saw a noticeable dip in Google Discover traffic across the network. It happened quickly and sharply enough that the shift is less likely to be explained by organic behavior or publisher changes.

If you’re investigating a drop on your own site, start by checking your regional data in Chartbeat. If your whole geographic region is seeing a decline, it is very likely a platform-wide change. If your region is stable and only your site is dropping, have your technical team dig in to ensure nothing is blocking your content from indexing correctly.

More importantly, stop treating platform traffic as a given. Invest in the channels you actually own. That means improving the experience in your own apps, making sure article pages have no dead ends, and making it easy for readers to share your work.

Is driving users deeper into content realistic given the dominance of mobile devices and hit-and-run content consumption?

If you had asked me 10 or 15 years ago, I would have said mobile visits are inherently short. That’s just not true anymore. It is entirely normal for someone to spend a long time on their phone in a frictionless, engaging environment. Long reads happen on mobile all the time.

If you want a true silver bullet for mobile growth, focus on faster loading speeds. Impatience while pages render is a massive barrier. The faster your mobile page loads, the healthier your audience will be.

Beyond that, you have to look at the psychology of reading. If a reader isn’t engaged for at least 15 seconds, the information rarely sticks. They bounce back to Google without ever remembering your brand.

That’s why getting readers to a second or third page matters. When you deliver a fast, engaging experience and give readers a reason to keep exploring, you start building a habit that can eventually lead them to skip search entirely.

The Search Challenge for Smaller Publishers

How can smaller outlets compete on search when original investigative pieces generate strong social traction and links from larger peers, but struggle to capture the same Google traffic?

That is simply the brutal challenge of the open web. Google’s ranking system can make it very difficult for smaller sites to compete with large publishers. That becomes especially challenging when original work is repurposed by larger peers.

I would love to see the industry lean more into partnerships. How can larger sites preview your work and give readers a compelling reason to come back to the original source?

When other outlets link to your original coverage, it automatically shows up in your Chartbeat data as an external link. You can track who links to you and use that as a foundation for starting a conversation about proper content attribution.

Focus on what you can control. Invest in original reporting that’s difficult to replicate. It’s an uphill battle, but building distinct brand recognition ensures that when people actively look for your specific information, search engines surface it.

Balancing Growth and the Paywall

How do you keep new readers engaged without weakening a strong paywall?

Managing a paywall should be more than a blunt, hard cutoff after a set number of articles. True audience growth requires a full-funnel strategy — understanding what brings people to the site, what builds frequency during registration, and what content leads up to a conversion event.

Rather than locking everything behind a rigid wall, successful publishers give new visitors room to explore, use mid-funnel recirculation to deepen engagement, and protect subscriber exclusives for retention. Technology is great for being “always on” to dynamically suggest conversion moments, but human editors are still better at knowing what content will attract a new audience in the first place. You need both working together to take advantage of every opportunity.