# New Research: What’s Really Happening with Search, Dark Social, and AI

## [Global audience insights from the first quarter of 2026](/content/resources/research/global-audience-insights-first-quarter-2026-13057/index.html)

In the first quarter of 2026, Average Engaged Time increased by 4.6 seconds in Central/Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, search traffic decreased sharply in the Middle East and Central Asia, and mobile…

## [Five lessons from a year’s worth of audience data](/content/resources/general/successful-2026-publishing-strategy/index.html)

This article originally appeared on INMA.org. After analyzing a year’s worth of audience data across thousands of websites, we’ve uncovered five insights about traffic, engagement, and growth to implement into your…

## [Eliminating Dead-End Pages and Optimizing for Recirculation](/content/resources/blog/eliminate-dead-end-pages-optimize-for-recirculation/index.html)

Many publishers focus on driving traffic, but what happens after a visitor lands on a site is more important for driving reader loyalty. Recirculation, or the percentage of readers who…

## [Global audience insights from the fourth quarter of 2025](/content/resources/articles/global-audience-insights-from-the-fourth-quarter-of-2025/index.html)

In the fourth quarter of 2025, Average Engaged Time remained highest in Central/Eastern Europe, social traffic increased across multiple regions, and reader loyalty saw a sharp increase in Africa.  Read…

## [The Most Engaging Stories of 2025](/content/resources/articles/most-engaging-stories-2025/index.html)

Our 2025 edition of The Most Engaging Stories reflects a year in which political figures dominated discourse around the world while violence, celebrity tributes, and health and science also found…

## [Audience Trends in the Age of AI](/content/resources/general/audience-trends-ai-age/index.html)

If you’ve spent any time in media circles lately, you’ve probably heard some variation of the phrase “traffic apocalypse.” It’s the idea that all the traditional channels of web traffic…

## [Global audience insights from the third quarter of 2025](/content/resources/articles/third-quarter-global-audience-insights-2025/index.html)

In the third quarter of 2025, Average Engaged Time fell across multiple regions, Mobile readership remained steady across a majority of regions, and Loyal readership remained highest in Northern Europe.…

## [What AI Headline Testing reveals about audience engagement](/content/resources/general/what-ai-headline-testing-reveals-about-audience-engagement/index.html)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has quickly become a regular part of newsroom conversations, with generative AI tools transforming how teams create, test, and optimize content to maximize reader engagement. At Chartbeat,…

## [The traffic source driving 40% of your pageviews](/content/resources/research/the-traffic-source-driving-40-percent-of-your-pageviews/index.html)

At any given moment, around 40% of your traffic isn’t coming from Google or Facebook. It’s coming from your own site. That’s internal traffic – the clicks readers make once…

## [Global audience insights from the second quarter of 2025](/content/resources/articles/global-audience-insights-from-the-second-quarter-of-2025/index.html)

In the second quarter of 2025, Average Engaged Time increased in the Middle East, mobile readership fell in Central Asia, and loyal readership remained highest in Northern Europe. Read on…

## [Readers who visit 2 site pages are 2.75x likelier to return than those visiting 1](/content/resources/general/increase-return-visits-news-sites/index.html)

This article originally appeared on INMA.org. In today’s digital landscape, capturing and retaining reader attention is more challenging than ever. How challenging? Consider that a Chartbeat analysis of more than 300…

## [Our playbook for winning over multi-platform audiences](/content/resources/research/our-playbook-for-winning-over-multi-platform-audiences/index.html)

Our events team was in Krakow last week for WAN-IFRA’s World News Congress. In addition to catching up with industry friends and partners and sharing the latest product updates at…