Year in Review 2019: Most visible UK news websites on Google

13. February 2020

By Chelsey Heath service@newsdashboard.com

We used the News Dashboard to analyze our extensive data on Google’s news-related ranking types for the UK in 2019.

Keep reading to learn more about the trends we found. We’ve also broken out rankings by category.

First, let’s look at changes in the overall mobile search engine results page (SERP) throughout the year.

Here are the changes in the Mobile news ranking types on the UK SERPs across 2019.

Starting in March, we can see a fairly extreme increase in Video Carousels. This highlights the increasing importance of video in the SERPs – including for news keywords – and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. To make more room for these carousels, fewer positions are open for other ranking types.

It’s clear the rise of video in Google’s news rankings will only continue to grow within the new decade. News publishers should pay particular attention to the percentage of video and Google News ranking spots taken by YouTube videos as they map out their 2020 strategies.

Desktop News Box

Overall leaders

theguardian.com
express.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
mirror.co.uk
thesun.co.uk

Both bbc.co.uk and theguardian.com appear in every category. With an appearance in eight categories is express.co.uk. Interestingly, despite their strong showing overall, both mirror.co.uk and thesun.co.uk only appear in three categories total.

Uk Desktop News Box - Sports category most visible publishers

The Top 5 publishers in Desktop News Box – Sports category in the UK across 2019.

sky.com and skysports.com appear in four categories, while both independent.co.uk and telegraph.co.uk appear in three. The following publishers appear only in one category:

cnn.com – World

ft.com – Business

theverge.com, t3.com and technradar.com – Technology

dailymail.co.uk – Entertainment

nasa.gov and space.com – Science

Another interesting note in the U.S. publishers who appear even outside of the World category.

Mobile News Box

The overall story in mobile is the same with one exception:

theguardian.com
express.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
dailymail.co.uk (instead of mirror.co.uk)
thesun.co.uk

Here are the Top 5 most visible publishers in the Mobile News Box – Technology category.

Another major difference comes in the Technology category, where eurogamer.net takes the place of bbc.co.uk – and express.co.uk is the only overall publisher to also be in this niche category.

In Entertainment, dailymail.co.uk beats out the more specialized skysports.com; in Science, independent.com appears instead of nasa.gov.

The Top 5 most visible publishers overall in Google News (news.google.com) mirrors that of Mobile News Box.

Winners and losers for keyword “brexit” over 2019

Easily one of the biggest news topics across 2019 in the UK, we examined visibility for the keyword “brexit” in Mobile News Boxes. December is an especially fascinating month, where the most visible publishers switch around noticeably – with express.co.uk coming out on top.