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:
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.
