I've been writing about SEO since I was 15 years old, and a decade later I'm fortunate to have consulted for companies I love like Ahrefs, Kinsta, Buffer, ConvertKit and multi-billion dollar brands.
The basics can be incredibly effective, but hundreds of sites cover them well and I want to focus on unique, creative ways to achieve better rankings.
Instead, here's my promise: I will put my absolute all into guides like this one to give original insights that help you get an edge over your competition.
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This is already too much text for a 'click-to-read-more-fade-thing' but there's more if you like.
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In an analysis of ~45 million keywords in which Google displayed their Top Stories SERP feature, the 1,000 most prominent domains accounted for 97.3% of all listings.
That’s just one of many insights I aim to share, as Detailed teamed up with News SEO platform NewzDash to analyse their exclusive research.
With this report I had a clear goal in mind: I wanted to know whether young, independent sites were able to rank in the SERP feature that sends an estimated 200 million monthly clicks to the top 100 sites alone.
I also wanted to know whether anyone could “game the system” and rank in Top Stories when they probably wouldn’t after a manual inspection.
I have all of these answers and more.
Special thanks to NewzDash and its founder John Shehata for helping to make this possible.
Newzdash is a news SEO tool that helps news organizations track their own and their competitors’ performance in Top Stories and Google News, including which keywords are trending in the news landscape. For a deeper dive into Newzdash’s capabilities and the data analyzed, please refer to this accompanying Google Document.
A Quick Note on ‘Outing’ – Primarily Regarding Independent Sites Ranking Well – Before I Dive In
For any independent site mentioned in this report, I will not dive into specifics like the terms they rank for or backlinks they’ve acquired.
I also won’t mention any independent sites that would potentially gain more competition from being discussed here (surprisingly, there are quite a few where this applies).
For instance, I’ve written about MacRumors in multiple reports here on Detailed. They’ve been open about SEO and search traffic in the past, and you aren’t going to disrupt their 20 years of brand building based on knowing they show up in Google’s Top Stories SERP feature.
Similarly, sites like PhoneArena aren’t shy about sharing their numbers:
Finally, after reducing my list significantly to only those I feel it’s fair to cover, I emailed every remaining independent site to mention their inclusion and ask if they would prefer to be removed.
Here are the replies I received:
I know an intro like this isn’t fun to read but it’s important to me that I’m not “outing” anyone.
What’s fair to cover differs massively amongst sites writing about search, but this feels like the right approach to me.
Of The 1,000 Most Prominent Domains Featured in Top Stories, We Classified 147 As Being Independent
While independent sites comprise 14.7% of the top 1,000 domains in our research, they only account for 3.3% of their overall market share.
Some of the top independent sites, in alphabetical order, include:
Heavy.com (Sports News)
Interesting Engineering (Engineering, Tech & Science News)
MacRumors (Apple News)
New Atlas (Technology & Science News)
PhoneArena (Phone News & Reviews)
ScienceAlert (Science News)
Stereogum (Music)
TheBlock (Crypto)
The Conversation (Analysis & Research)
The Shade Room (Trending Celebrity News)
TheWrap (Entertainment News)
Later in this report I’ll cover more (and young) independent sites that stood out, but for now I wanted to share how many we found.
Of course, not everyone will agree with our definitions here.
Crypto site The Block is a good example to help show how difficult classification can be. They’re very clear about their editorial independence, but they also received investment from a venture firm in November 2023.
I still view them as independent, but I understand not everyone would agree.
The Big Question: Are Any Young Sites Performing Well in Google’s Top Stories SERP Feature?
Getting the exact age of a website can be challenging. A domain might have been registered 20 years ago but only had someone start building a website on it three years ago.
Similarly, a site may have been owned by a huge brand in the past, then abandoned for a year or two, and now taken over by an independent owner.
While I can’t be flawless with my research here unless we speak with every single site owner, I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible if for no other reason than I would like these insights for myself.
After checking the domain registration dates for all 1,000 sites and manually checking dozens of them with low ages, there were nine sites around the five-year-old mark.
What’s perhaps motivating is that four of the sites were younger than three years old; one was precisely two years old and one was younger still — launched in March 2023.
They’re quite interesting, so let’s hone in on them.
#1
Northern News Now Isn’t Technically Two Years Old (But Still Interesting To Me)
I feel comfortable sharing Northern News Now as they’re part of a more prominent media brand, Gray Local, and people aren’t going to suddenly try and compete with a news site for a local area.
On the site you’ll find everything happening in Duluth and the larger Minnesota area.
As far as I can tell, the domain was registered two years ago and has never had any content on it before.
That said, there were multiple other news sites owned by Gray Local which now redirect to NorthernNewsNow, which is why I say it isn’t technically two years old.
#2
The San Francisco Standard was Launched in 2021
The next site on the list, launched in 2021, is The San Francisco Standard.
Financed by venture capitalist Michael Moritz, they’re open about reaching millions of readers each month.
If Ahrefs data is accurate then featuring in Top Stories typically makes up around 10-20% of their search traffic. Around 10-20,000 visitors each month.
#3
KFF Health News Is Also Young, But Was Also The Product of Redirects
The next site that stood out to me was built on a domain first registered on November 24th, 2021.
Semrush and Ahrefs data confirms they never picked up any search traffic until March of 2023 — just 15 months ago.
That said, KFF Health News content used to be published on KaiserHealthNews.org, which now redirects to the site in question.
(I’m not sure if there were other domains as part of their history).
Again, this isn’t technically a new site, but it’s interesting (even if it’s unsurprising) that Top Stories representation can be passed on from one domain to the next.
#4
Founded in 2020, Democracy Docket Has More than 200,000 Email Subscribers
Democracy Docket is focused on “helping people better understand the greatest challenges facing voters and our democracy.”
In just four years they’ve grown to 200,000 email subscribers and 700,000 social media followers. I suspect those numbers are quite a bit higher now since their YouTube channel has 20% more subscribers than the count when they last updated their About page.
I don’t read political sites myself, but I love the clean design of their site.
#5
Launched Just Three Years Ago, On3 Already Reaches 10M+ Monthly Visitors
Shannon Terry might just be one of the most successful founders you’ve (probably) never heard of.
In 2000 he co-founded Rivals.com, which was acquired by Yahoo.
In 2010 he acquired 247 Sports, which CBS Sports later acquired.
In August 2021 he started On3, a media and technology company primarily focused on high school and college sports.
According to Shannon’s updates, by their second anniversary they were already reaching 10M+ monthly visitors, with a team comprising of almost 200 people.
The site was the 109th most popular domain in our research, with Ahrefs estimating they receive around 600,000 monthly visitors from the Top Stories feature.
#6
The Second Most Interesting Site (To Me) Launched in July of 2022
This site I identified is just over two years old and at times gets almost all of its search traffic – hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors – from appearing in Top Stories.
It’s a personal site covering a specific sport, e.g. Tennis, and sadly I feel like revealing their URL would technically be “outing” them and giving them much more competition.
To give a similar example to what you would expect there, picture it very much like Tennis.com but focused on a different sport.
I messaged one of the site’s founders for permission to share it but have yet to receive a response.
I estimate their dozens of writers publish around 500-1,000 articles per month. A huge number likely only made possible by the topic they’re covering.
Sticking with Tennis as an example, an individual match could result in articles on the stars’ social media updates, injury status, match predictions and then commentary on the outcome.
Then consider how many tennis matches are played around the world each month and it hopefully helps paint a better picture of how they can write so much.
To be clear: The site is legitimate and impressive and created by people incredibly passionate about the topic they’re covering.
I just also feel it would be getting attention the owners would not want if I shared it here.
Fortunately I did get permission to share my favourite young site overall…
#7
My Favourite Example, By Far, is Just Over a Year Old (With Permission to Share)
It took me three LinkedIn DMs, two emails and a tweet to get in touch with someone at the following example. That’s how much I love the site and wanted to share it here.
Launched in March of 2023, Escape Collective is focused on the world of cycling, with the motto “Riding is life.”
I don’t even own a bicycle and just fell in love with how meticulous they are with every aspect of the project, such as:
- An About page with a real mission and personal story
- A design where every pixel feels thoughtfully placed (even if Dark Mode isn’t for me)
- An updated transparency report on how their business is going
- An undeniable passion for their topic
I could go on, but you get the idea: It’s my absolute dream kind of website to come across – that’s just how my brain works – and the type of content and media brand I really hope can survive and thrive for the foreseeable future.
I mean, just look at their ‘Founders Wall’ where they show the names of all the members who support them. You can hover over each one to see the message that person left (orange bubble in the screenshot below):
Find yourself on their story page and you’ll learn that most of their team previously worked for CyclingTips.com (no longer online), which was acquired by digital goliath Outside and then later folded into their velo.outside.com subdomain.
In their own words,
OutsideInc shut down CyclingTips soon after and most of the content is inaccessible now. Fifteen years of our work, with the aim of showcasing the amazing stories in our sport, is now gone.
We’re only six months into our journey at Escape Collective and have no interest in resting on our laurels. There’s a renewed sense of energy within the team and we feel like (and are) in start-up mode again.
Until last month their search traffic was trending up and to the right according to third-party estimates, though they have quite a few improvements needed on the technical side.
If you want more examples of independent sites performing well, we’ll get to them later on in this report.
Until then…
Is Anyone Being Promoted Who Doesn’t “Deserve” To Be?
For the most part, sites that “fit” into Google’s Top Stories SERP feature make total sense.
No matter your political leaning, it should be no surprise to see brands like The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, BBC and The Guardian in some of the top spots.
What I really wanted to see with this research was whether anyone was “sneaking in”.
Was anyone able to get a lot of traffic from this Top Stories feature that stood out as being particularly odd?
After multiple people looked at all 1,000 sites individually, we identified just three as highly questionable.
(Questionable seems like the fairest way to define them without knowing the entire history of a brand.)
I don’t know if that’s higher or lower than you expected, but I’m also happy it wasn’t zero because checking took longer than I would like to admit.
Some of the features of sites that made them questionable to us were:
- Lacking a logo
- Broken about page links
- Clearly AI-generated authors
- Constant SEO and clickbait-focused headlines
The lack of a logo applied to two sites, which is pretty funny as it tends to be the first thing webmasters take care of. We checked on multiple browsers and internet connections to ensure caching or extensions weren’t interfering.
When you look at so many sites, it’s pretty easy for your brain to think, “Hmm, this one’s a bit different”, and that’s what happened for three in our original dataset and four more in an additional dataset.
To be respectful, and because I don’t want to impact anyone’s business, I won’t mention the websites publicly here.
Giving credit to Google, these sites only averaged an estimated 40,000 visitors per month from the Top Stories SERP feature. So, while some questionable sites are being promoted, they’re not dominating the conversation either.
Finally, I should mention that we are looking at the top 1,000 domains which account for 97.3% of all market share. It’s possible (and likely) that there are more questionable sites that make up the thousands of domains in the remaining 2.7%.
The Top 20 Domains Overall
On a personal level, my main focus with this research was to see whether young sites can perform well in Google’s Top Stories feature and if anyone has been able to “game the system” to be featured consistently.
While I don’t think there will be too many surprises in the most prominent domains, I still found it interesting to look at.
The content categories we analysed from NewzDash data that make up these rankings are Top Trends, National News, World, Business, Technology, Entertainment, Sports, Science and Health.
The Top Domains for the First Half of 2024
Here are the twenty most prominent sites that appeared in Google’s Top Stories feature for ~45 million keywords, from January 2024 to June 30th, 2024.
| Rank | Site | Visibility Jan 1st to June 30th, 2024 |
July ’24 Top Stories Traffic Estimates via Ahrefs |
| 20 |  Variety |
0.93% | 1.2M |
| 19 |  Winners and Whiners |
1.06% | 0.18M |
| 18 |  The Athletic* |
1.17% | See * below |
| 17 |  Daily Mail |
1.27% | 5M |
| 16 |  Washington Post |
1.43% | 3.5M |
| 15 |  NBC News |
1.44% | 3.5M |
| 14 |  BBC |
1.51% | 8.1M |
| 13 |  CBS News |
1.65% | 1.6M |
| 12 |  Sports Illustrated |
1.66% | 5.1M |
| 11 |  The Guardian |
1.86% | 8.2M |
| 10 |  NYPost |
1.93% | 4.4M |
| 9 |  FOX News |
2.1% | 4.8M |
| 8 |  AP News |
2.27% | 6.7M |
| 7 |  People |
2.38% | 2.7M |
| 6 |  CBS Sports |
2.53% | 2.6M |
| 5 |  The New York Times |
3.07% | 10.5M | 4 |  CNN |
3.19% | 7.2M |
| 3 |  ESPN |
3.9% | 3.9M |
| 2 |  Yahoo |
4.09% | 2.9M |
| 1 |  USA Today |
4.16% | 5.7M |
*The Athletic is no longer operated on an independent domain and now resides in a subdirectory of The New York Times.
It says a lot about the power and success of their brand that they were still able to show up so prominently in this report.
There are a few reasons why our ordering would not match Ahrefs’ estimated traffic, but the primary one is that Ahrefs data looks at just one month. In contrast, we are calculating visibility based on the entire first half of 2024.
Comparing monthly, there will still be a big difference in the terms each tool is tracking (possibly a difference of millions) and we also have to factor in things like who is more reactive to trending topics.
The Top Domains for June, 2024
Three new sites appeared in the top twenty domains overall when looking at just a single month.
| Rank | Site | Visibility Data for June, 2024 |
July ’24 Top Stories Traffic Estimates via Ahrefs |
| 20 | Daily Mail |
1.09% | 5M |
| 19 |  FOX Sports |
1.13% | 0.4M |
| 18 |  ABCNews.Go.com |
1.15% | 2M |
| 17 |  Forbes |
1.35% | 6M |
| 16 |  Space.com |
1.50% | 0.19M |
| 15 | Washington Post |
1.84% | 3.5M |
| 14 | NBC News |
1.85% | 3.5M |
| 13 | The Guardian |
1.85% | 8.2M |
| 12 | CBS Sports |
1.94% | 2.6M |
| 11 | NYPost |
1.96% | 4.4M |
| 10 | BBC |
1.99% | 8.1M |
| 9 | CBS News |
2.09% | 1.6M |
| 8 | People |
2.11% | 2.7M |
| 7 | FOX News |
2.23% | 4.8M |
| 6 | AP News |
3.09% | 6.7M |
| 5 | ESPN |
3.43% | 3.9M |
| 4 | CNN |
3.99% | 7.2M |
| 3 | USA Today |
4.04% | 5.7M |
| 2 | Yahoo |
4.3% | 2.9M |
| 1 | The New York Times |
5.09% | 10.5M |
Hopefully having both side by side makes the data more interesting and shows how many clicks are up for grabs with this SERP feature.
Just Five Companies Are Behind 188 of the Top 1,000 Sites
Similar to my reporting on the 16 companies dominating Google, the Top Stories SERP feature is not excused from being dominated by a handful of companies.
Just five brands control 18.8% of the top 1,000 sites.
The top ten brands are behind 284 of the top 1,000 sites.
It may not be enough to make headlines like my 16 companies report, but that’s a lot of consolidation into deciding what news (and from which angle) you’ll see in search results.
The top five media brands were:
| Brand | Example Sites | Sites in Top 1,000 |
|---|---|---|
 Tegna |
WFAA, KHOU, WKYC, KYUE | 27 |
 Hearst |
Delish, Bicycling.com, San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate | 37 |
 Vox Media |
The Verge, The Ringer, Vulture, Polygon | 38 |
 Nexstar |
KTLA, The Hill, KDVR, WFLA | 41 |
 Gannett |
USA Today, The Tennessean, Detroit Free Press | 46 |
(As an interesting side note, Tegna was previously Gannett before it spun into two separate public companies).
If you’re in the news business, I hope you find these insights interesting.
If you’re not in the news business, then you’re probably like me and find Vox Media and Hearst the most fascinating as they run a large number of sites more akin to what I would build myself.
Here’s a sample of the 38 Vox Media sites that were present in our research:
As you can tell, many of their brands use the SBNation (SportsBlogs Nation) moniker. SBNation’s parent company, Sports Blogs Inc, was rebranded as Vox Media in 2011.
Hearst is the only one I’m not confident with here, as I’ll explain in a second, so if you were to remove them from the list the next most prominent brand would be NBCUniversal.
When I track Hearst as part of the 16 companies dominating Google, I’m monitoring more typical media brands for them like Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Elle.
In this report however they also have a large number of brands associated with Hearst Television.
Even as someone who has reported on this space for years, I’m still not entirely sure of all the ownership and association agreements here and how they all tie together.
I think I have these categorised correctly but I’ll update the table if I hear otherwise.
Here’s How We Categorised the Top 1,000 Sites Overall
Before I get into the specifics, I want to restate that categorising sites was challenging and we aren’t perfect here.
Smithsonian Magazine (https://smithsonianmag.com), looks like it could have an independent or media brand owner if you’re unfamiliar with the name. In reality, it’s part of the Smithsonian Institute which has 21 museums and nine research centres worldwide.
How would you categorise that one?
Most sites are obvious and easy to categorise, but a portion could fit into multiple categories.
Either way, I hope it’s always clear that I try to be accurate in my reporting because I want answers for myself just as much as I want to share them with others.
With that said, here’s the tally:
| Site Type | Example Site(s) | Sites in Top 1,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Government | NASA.gov, Ny.gov, Justice.gov | 20 |
| Large Brand | RolandGarros.com, NFL.com, NBA.com, Olympics.com | 129 |
| Independent | MacRumors, Stereogum, PhoneArena | 147 |
| Media Brand | Variety and Rolling Stone, owned by Penske | 704 |
I hadn’t initially considered there would be so many ‘Large Brands’ in the results but it makes sense in hindsight.
There’s probably a better way to reference sites like the official Olympics domain and I’m open to ideas in future reports, but that description felt apt for now.
Ten Additional Insights from Weeks of Research
I’ve already covered most of the main insights we hoped to find, but often when doing large research projects like this, you learn new things along the way.
#1
PR Newswire May Give Anyone the Chance (Technically) to Appear in ‘Top Stories’
The 472nd most prominent domain on our list was PR Newswire from Cision, with a 0.03% market share from the tens of millions of keywords looked at.
According to Ahrefs, that translates to anywhere from 100,000 to 400,000 visitors per month to the site from Top Stories.
PR Newswire differs from other sites we came across because it’s a press release distribution service rather than a news site itself.
With prices ranging from $199 to $1,649 (according to TrustRadius, as PRNewswire don’t have a pricing page), you can submit your own news and have a chance at showing up in this prominent SERP feature.
You can get an idea of what Google is already rewarding for them with some smart Ahrefs (homepage link) filters:
It’s interesting to see that in the past six months alone they had an estimated 2,554 different press releases show up in Top Stories.
Financially I don’t think it makes much sense for this to be your best way into Top Stories, but it might be suitable for an experiment now and then.
#2
A PR Newswire Alternative I Had Never Heard Of Also Showed Up in Our Data (Starting at €19 Per Submission)
Another PR Newswire-like service in our research was OpenPR, ranked #773 out of the top 1,000 sites.
I haven’t been active in the press release space for a while so this might not be new to you, I wasn’t previously familiar with them. They offer free submissions, but normal pricing rates start at €19 ($21) each.
The numbers Ahrefs report they’re picking up from Top Stories are very small (around 10,000 visitors per month) and primarily stock-related. Keep in mind that NewzDash and Ahrefs likely look at a very different set of terms.
I haven’t used the service myself but even then I can state you shouldn’t use them with the expectation you’ll show up in Top Stories by default. That’s not how things work.
Similarly, when they say things like:
openPR.com harnesses the power of SEO to ensure that when you submit a press release, it works harder for you. Our platform is optimized to enhance your content’s ranking for relevant keywords, driving organic traffic and significantly improving your online discoverability.
It’s my responsibility to advise you to proceed with a healthy amount of scepticism.
#3
Independent Sites Doing Well Are Pretty Inspiring When You See the Numbers They Share
I’ve already mentioned how sites like PhoneArena are open about their numbers, but they’re not the only ones.
AMBCrypto is pulling in some impressive numbers for a site launched in 2018:
Other independent sites that are open about their traffic include:
Crypto Potato | 2.5M monthly visits (Self reported) 
Lets Run | 1M monthly unique visitors (Self reported)
Clutch Points | 20M monthly users (Self reported)
80 Level | 1.5M monthly visits (Self reported)
ZME Science | 1M+ monthly readers (Self reported)
Event Hubs | 10M+ annual readers (Self reported)
Jacobin | 3M monthly “audience” (Self reported)
The Hockey Writers | 5M monthly pageviews (Self reported)
As always, out of respect for the sites in question I’m not going to dive into any specific rankings, backlinks, content angles or similar.
It may also be the case that sites have not updated these figures (typically found in their footer or About page) for a while.
Still, I really enjoy clicking around brands I likely wouldn’t come across otherwise.
#4
Yahoo Performing So Well is a Slightly Controversial Topic in the World of SEO
Yahoo was second overall in June 2024 and also the second most prominent domain in Top Stories for the first half of 2024.
You might not know that many of Yahoo’s rankings are for articles created by sites they syndicate the content of.
This specific article above pulled in an estimated 17,000 clicks for Yahoo from the Top Stories SERP feature, despite being written for – and canonicalizing to – another website.
In other words, the canonical tag appears to have little to no impact on hindering Yahoo from ranking.
Thanks to great reporting on this topic from NewzDash (which Search Engine Roundtable added to), we know Yahoo is dominant when it comes to “competing” against the sites they syndicate content from.
As Glenn Gabe and Lily Ray have shared, the solution (not partnering with Yahoo or having them noindex your content) is not that straightforward.
This has been getting attention for a long time so I wouldn’t expect any significant changes to Yahoo’s dominance, but it’s still worth keeping an eye on.
#5
Cox Were The Only Media Brand to Block Visitors from Outside of the United States
I’ll keep this one to the point as the headline is self-explanatory.
It’s not a huge surprise to see sites only available to people in specific locations, but Cox Media were the only media brand where this was the case.
This message was present on all eight of their sites.
#6
We Categorised 226 Individual Media Brands Behind 704 Sites
Earlier in this report we shared that the top five media brands overall – by how many sites appeared in our research – were Gannett, Nexstar, Hearst, Vox Media and Tegna.
We defined 704 sites as being part of a media company, of which there were 209.
Sometimes it’s tough to decide if a small network of sites is a media company or should be defined as independent so view these numbers as our own interpretation, rather than fact.
Other media brands we defined include:
| Media Brand | Example Site(s) |
|---|---|
| Condé Nast | WIRED, Vanity Fair, Glamour |
| Lad Bible Group Media | UNILAD, GAMINGbible, SPORTbible |
| Future | Tom’s Hardware, Space.com, Live Science |
| Valnet | ScreenRant, GameRant, Collider |
| Minute Media | Sports Illustrated, LA Sports Hub, 90Min |
Outside of this report we now track the sites and search traffic of more than 300 media companies. If there’s interest in sharing some of our favourites, I might just have to put together an article on that.
#7
890 of the Sites Use a .com Domain Extension
It should come as no surprise that most of the top sites on the internet use a .com domain extension.
Only three of the top 100 domains didn’t have this extension. Those three were dailymail.co.uk, independent.co.uk and sportsmole.co.uk.
The top 10 extensions overall (in ascending order) were:
- .in (3 sites)
- .tv (4 sites)
- .cn (4 sites)
- .ca (5 sites)
- .edu (7 sites)
- .gov (9 sites)
- .co.uk (13 sites)
- .net (20 sites)
- .org (25 sites)
- .com (890 sites)
Other extensions in our reporting included .biz, .cc and .earth.
I had no idea .earth was a thing.
#8
A Surprising Number of News Sites Use BLOX CMS
I will link to Blox, but note that their website only works if you’re in the EU. Here’s the link: https://www.bloxdigital.com/solutions/content/
To determine ownership of a site it’s generally easiest to go to its footer to find their copyright information or links to their About page. As we did that repeatedly, we saw a surprising number of news sites referencing BLOX’s Content Management System.
BLOX offers a CMS, among other things, to help you create, monetise and distribute your content.
Their homepage claims they’re behind over 2,000 sites, reaching over 121m monthly users. With how prominent they were, I believe them.
A quick look at the top sites mentioning them in Semrush and you can see a good chunk of their users:
I have zero affiliation with BLOX and they don’t know they’re being mentioned here, but if you’re in the news space and curious about what they do, you might want to start on their case studies page.
#9
Newspack, Created by WordPress.com and Funded by Google, is Another Popular CMS
Another content management system I noticed referenced in a large number of website footers was Newspack, created by Automattic (the commercial arm of WordPress).
Founded in 2019, their About page claims they’re powering over 200 websites.
Based on how many sites have 100+ links pointed their way (meaning, they’re more likely to be sitewide links) then data from Semrush (homepage link) shows the number today might be twice as big:
Pricing starts at $750 per month if you make up to $250,000 in annual revenue, then increases based on your financial success.
#10
Finding Independent Sites in Google News / Top Stories Feels Like a Smart Acquisition Strategy
With every Google Core update there seem to be highs and lows for people running content sites—especially those building to be acquired.
Google is one of many sources of traffic sites rely on, of course, but it’s arguably the most valuable and has a ton of potential outside of paying for visitors.
When you niche down your research to specific topics, there are lots of great, independent sites worth investigating further.
I’ve spoken with a few people buying up content sites right now and suggested to some that finding independent sites already in Google News could be a good place to look.
It makes you a little less reliant on where you rank in typical search results — evidenced by several sites in our research getting almost all of their traffic (at times) from the Top Stories SERP feature.
It’s also possible that a site already featured in Google News / Top Stories has:
- Been around for a long time and picked up a lot of links
- Has published a lot of content you might be able to improve the rankings of
- Gets direct traffic
- Has an audience on social media platforms
There will always be sites where this isn’t the case, but it definitely increases your chances when doing research for acquisition outreach.
I’m not an expert on the requirements for inclusion in Top Stories, and understand you don’t have to be a Google News source to be included, but sites are likely to be visible in both.
Needless to say, there were a few sites that came up in my research (not covered here out of respect for adding to their competition) I think would make good acquisition targets.
Finally, Should We Make This a New Annual Report?
If you found this fascinating and would like to see it become part of a new annual report here at Detailed, sharing this would be greatly appreciated.
You can comment on this report on X (Twitter), LinkedIn and Facebook where I try to thank people for every comment, Like and share.
If there’s a good reaction to this piece – I’ve never really written anything like it before – then I would love to make this an annual or semi-annual thing to track.
I had a lot of fun diving into the data here and would love to do it again (if John’s open to it, of course).
It’s not professional to end a report this way but I’ll do it anyway…
Thank you so much for reading!
