A big topic at the the 2024 GV Summit was “audience”, and there was a desire among the community to get more involved. To this end, I'm working on adding more “referrer traffic” stats to the quarterly stats I collect related to our traffic, and so that we can all work on this together, I'll try to share them each quarter going forward.
Historically we have tracked the overall traffic (visits and pageviews), but not the specific sources of the traffic, such as search and social. Google Analytics has always made it hard to provide summaries of traffic sources because the list they give is a mess, with “Facebook” being split across several items that need to be cleaned up each time you look at the list.
The stats below are for 2024 Q3 (Jul/Aug/Sep) and Q4 (Oct/Nov/Dec). They are taken from our Plausible Analytics account, which only covers the English GV site. Plausible gives a much easier-to-use list of sources than Google Analytics. Sorry that only GV English is accounted for, but as it also has the most traffic, it is very representative.
If you want to engage with these numbers directly, you can visit copies I made of the data into Google Drive: Q3 2024 Referrers spreadsheet, Q4 2024 referrers spreadsheet.
Q3 and Q4 referrers as listed by Plausible Analytics.
Jer's Analysis
- Google: Clearly, the vast majority of our referral traffic is from Google. For both quarters, they dominate with over 8x as much traffic as the next source. We must always consider Google and search traffic if we want to maintain and increase our audience. This can be done both on a technical level (my job) and on an editorial one, by writing headlines, taglines, and excerpts that draw in audiences who see our posts in Google and other search engines.
- Direct / None: This item can be a bit confusing, as it includes both people who type our address in directly, and many source that might be “social media” but aren't tagged as such. For example I know I have singlehandedly clicked on enough GV articles from Mastodon to show up on this list (further down than the screenshots show), but my Mastodon client doesn't show up. Direct / None is a container for “Everything else”, both loyal readers, and people using anything but the common, default apps to view us.
- Bing: It may not seem popular to us, but Bing sends us more traffic than Facebook, X, Linkedin, and Bluesky combined. Search, in all it's forms, is a huge source of traffic. Yandex and DuckDuckGo are other search engines that also bring us more traffic than any of the social media services.
- Facebook/X/Reddit: These all deliver less traffic than we would think compared to the total. They are still vital as they constitute higher quality viewers than search, ideally a truly engaged readership, but from an absolute perspective, no one of them truly moves the needle on traffic. All of these services have seen major declines over the years.
- Bluesky: The numbers here are unimpressive, but it's worth nothing that Bluesky is experiencing enormous growth as I write this. The data in the screenshots above is for the second half of 2024, but Bluesky had a huge boost in December. I did a quick check comparing the first week of Nov 2024 to the first week of Jan 2025, and the Bluesky traffic quintupled from 19 in Nov, to 100 in Jan. These numbers are small overall, but the growth is still impressive and Bluesky is worth keeping an eye on.
- ChatGPT/Perplexity: These are AI tools, somehow sending us traffic. I'm not sure exactly how, but I imagine they are citing us as a source in their output, or linking to us from their new search tools. This is a new frontier, and I personally am not an enthusiast of AI, but disturbingly it seems we need to take them seriously, as in Q4, ChatGPT is already sending us more traffic than Facebook or X.
What do you see in these results?
