Search engines accounted for 12% of all page views at North American publishers in Chartbeat’s network, based on the data found within the analytics firm’s Q3’26 Audience Report, which was released October 15th, 2026, whereas they represented 21% of page views as reported in the firm’s Q3’25 report.
The two reports contain search engine page view share by region. There are ten total regions included in each report. Nine of these regions have experienced a decrease in the proportion of their total page views generated through a search engine versus last year. Only one of the ten has seen an increase in this number, that being Africa.
Search Share Fell In Nine Of 10 Regions
Central Asia’s search share decreased by the most, as it dropped from 53 percent down to 33 percent. North America’s share dropped by nine percentage points, as did that of the Middle East. Meanwhile, Africa’s search share increased from 41 percent to 46 percent.
Of those nine points lost for North America, five were lost between the third and fourth quarters of 2025. In fact, North American search share was 16% in Chartbeat’s Q4 2025 report, then 13% for Q2 2026 and 12% for Q3 on the latest chart.
What The Shares Don’t Show
Search’s share of total page views for each region is shown as a bar in the reports’ charts. Search share (or search’s percentage) may go down because search sent fewer page views during that time frame than it had before, because another source or sources sent more page views, or both.
No specific number of page view traffic was given by the takeaway from the Q3 2026 Report on overall traffic. The same exact sentence (“overall traffic to publishers in the Chartbeat network remains steady”) was also written in the Q4 2025 Report. Neither Q3 report gave an indication of how many websites were included in these statistics or whether the same website(s) were analyzed each year. The company, which sells analytics tools to publishers, concluded the Q3 2026 Report with an advertisement inviting users to request a demonstration.
What The Reports Say About The Cause
The Q3 2026 Report’s takeaway does not say why search’s share declined, but two older reports have pointed to AI. The Q4 2025 report stated that the decline is “likely a result of AI’s growing impact on search.” The Q1 2026 report indicated that this is likely partly due to how AI affects content discovery.
Chartbeat reports all search engines (such as Google and Bing) as one category within its chart data. Therefore, we cannot tell if the decline came specifically from a drop off in Google Search page views. However, the 2026 Publisher Playbook by Chartbeat, which I covered in September, reports Google Search separately for the entire network.
Why This Matters
A search-share benchmark from Chartbeat’s Q3 2025 figure for North America is nine points higher than the same for Q3 2026 in that market area.
Using this comparison for yourself will help you determine if your search share (your ratio of page views that came from search) fits within the traffic mix of other publishers on the same network as you.
Looking Ahead
The quarterly search shares shown here are a way to get an idea of the percentage of page views that come from search in each region. By tracking your own successive quarterly search-referred page view counts against each quarterly search share, you can see if there have been changes over time, either fewer page views from search, or a shrinking portion of a changing total.
