Web Stories Showing Zero Traffic in Discover

Hi @sbarker13, your Web Stories do not have any AMP validation errors that would prevent them from getting any traffic. Since we are limited to Web Stories plugin support, I recommend asking in the?Google Analytics forums?and Search Console Help your specific questions about traffic. As mentioned in this sticky post, these specific questions about traffic declines, ranking, crawling, and indexing are best answered by those experts.

So I am just curious, since you guys run the app, did you not know that there was a bug affecting web stories and preventing them from being shown? I would think the app would have knowledge of these types of issues. It’s very frustrating spending hours creating web stories only to hear they do not work. There are numerous reports that people are seeing zero traffic from web stories right now. Do they work? Is there a bug? Shouldn’t you guys be able to find this out?

The community chat you linked to is also ZERO help. It does not answer any questions or give any answers as to whether there is another web stories bug or if they are working or not.

Please detail exactly what you are referring to.

a bug affecting web stories and preventing them from being shown?

Low traffic on Web Stories could be due to many factors that would need to align with best practices for creating Web Stories, and sometimes it could just be due to the story not getting any traffic. Again, you’d have to reach out to Google Search Console for help on why your stories aren’t getting any traffic.

If there is a bug in the Web Stories plugin itself, please detail the steps to reproduce it and we’ll be happy to investigate it further.

There are so many articles online about this, found with a Google Search. I don’t understand how the support team running the plugin cannot know about this. There is something wrong, web stories went from having multiple stories receiving traffic and then one day they all just disappear. That’s not how web stories have ever worked since they started.

Google claims they fixed the October bug, but it is not fixed as there are numerous reports of people this month receiving zero traffic or impressions. A drop in traffic is one thing, but for Discover to be showing absolutely nothing is not normal.

https://searchengineland.com/google-fixed-a-bug-with-the-october-2023-core-update-impacting-discover-traffic-434078

https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/133464231/can-t-get-web-stories-indexed-or-seen-since-october-19th?hl=en

Hi! I lost all visitors from Discover too since October, and i don’t have any hope in near future if my portal will recover back visitors. Some people will try new sites with new domains do try to get Discover visits again.

Since october i don’t have any motivation to create webstories anymore, and i have more from 4600 stories published in my site, from 3 years since i begin to use this plugin.

More infos here too:

https://www.amsive.com/insights/seo/traffic-declines-in-google-discover-top-stories-google-news-affect-publishers-across-the-globe/

Since october this its my Google Discover traffic:

In October Google kills many sites, and niche portais (like my blog, with focuses in Fortnite guides and nwes, gaming news, pop culture and animes) don’t have any chances anymore. I only see new portals or bigger websites in Discover in my country.