UK Publisher Loses 98% of News Visibility

A UK news publisher reportedly saw its visibility for trending Google News searches plunge by 98% after moving its website from a .co.uk domain to .com.

The figures, provided by NewzDash, show that the publisher’s visibility fell from around 1–2% to just 0.02% within two weeks of the migration. However, SEO expert John Shehata has stressed that the domain change may not have been the only factor behind the decline.

The website had already been experiencing weaker visibility during several Google core updates, while technical problems may also have contributed to the losses.

Trending News Visibility Drops Sharply

NewzDash tracked the publisher’s .co.uk domain for 14 months before the move. During that period, its visibility across the news searches monitored by the platform generally remained between 1% and 2%.

For comparison, Shehata says similarly sized publishers typically achieve visibility of between 3% and 6%.

Following the move to .com, visibility dropped to approximately 0.02% after two weeks. This represents a decline of around 98% based on NewzDash’s measurement.

The new .com domain has not recovered the visibility previously held by the .co.uk site. Four months after the migration, it was reportedly appearing only occasionally in the monitored results.

The publisher is not named, and the underlying data has not been made publicly available, meaning the figures cannot be independently verified.

Why Different SEO Tools Show Different Results

The scale of the decline appears to depend partly on what is being measured.

Shehata says traditional SEO platforms often monitor a predetermined group of keywords, with many focused on evergreen searches. NewzDash takes a different approach by monitoring changing, trending news queries across Google Top Stories and organic results.

This distinction can produce significantly different assessments of a site’s performance.

According to Shehata, other SEO tools suggested a decline of roughly 60–70%, while the NewzDash data indicated a 98% fall in visibility.

For publishers, this highlights the risk of relying solely on fixed keyword tracking when evaluating a migration. A website can appear to have retained a reasonable level of visibility for established keywords while suffering much greater losses when breaking news searches are included.

Google Warns Domain Migrations Can Take Time

Moving a website from one domain to another is a recognised type of site migration, but Google advises site owners to expect some disruption while its systems recrawl and process the new URLs.

The process includes creating a detailed URL mapping, putting permanent redirects in place, submitting a Change of Address through Search Console and closely monitoring the new site.

Google states that permanent redirects do not result in a loss of PageRank, although ranking fluctuations can occur while the move is processed.

For larger websites, Google recommends considering a staged migration rather than moving everything at once. It also advises against combining a domain change with other major changes, such as a new CMS or website redesign.

The time required for a migration can vary considerably depending on the size and complexity of the website.

Extra Considerations for Google News

News publishers have additional factors to consider because visibility depends on more than standard organic rankings.

Google’s guidance for publishers recommends following the normal site-move process, updating News sitemaps where necessary and making sure Googlebot can crawl the new site without difficulty.

Publishers should also avoid unnecessary redirect chains that could make it harder for Google to process the migration.

Google News considers a range of signals when determining rankings, including relevance, freshness, prominence, authoritativeness, usability, location and language.

However, Google’s published guidance does not specifically explain how a publisher’s historical performance in Google News transfers from one hostname to another.

Could a Domain Move Trigger a ‘Reset’?

Shehata believes major changes to a website can result in Google reassessing the site as a whole.

He refers to this as a “Google Reset”, although this is his own description rather than an official Google term.

His argument is that news publishers may build up a level of recognition and editorial history associated with their existing domain. While redirects can transfer signals such as link equity, Shehata questions whether all of the historical signals associated with a publication’s old hostname are carried across in the same way.

Google’s documentation does not confirm that Google News history is specifically tied to a hostname.

Shehata therefore recommends taking a more cautious approach, particularly for large news websites. His suggestion is to move sections of a site progressively and monitor whether the new domain begins appearing in Google News before completing the full migration.

What Publishers Should Consider Before Moving

The case highlights why news publishers may need to look beyond conventional SEO reports when planning a domain change.

A standard migration audit based largely on evergreen keywords could fail to show a substantial decline in visibility for rapidly changing news searches.

Publishers considering a move should therefore monitor a broad range of search performance before and after the migration, including trending queries and Google News exposure.

It is also important to separate the effects of the domain change from other potential causes, such as technical problems, redesigns, CMS changes or ongoing Google algorithm updates.

No Clear Recovery Yet

According to Shehata, the publisher had not seen a meaningful recovery four months after switching domains.

It remains unclear how much of the decline can be directly attributed to the .com migration, particularly given the site’s previous losses and reported technical issues.

The lack of a named publisher and publicly available source data also makes it difficult to establish exactly what happened.

Nevertheless, the case provides a useful warning for publishers planning a domain consolidation. Google itself acknowledges that major site moves can cause temporary ranking fluctuations, while the NewzDash data suggests that tracking trending news visibility could reveal problems that conventional keyword monitoring misses.

For news publishers, checking performance across rapidly changing search queries before making a domain move could therefore be just as important as monitoring established rankings.