Referral Traffic - Google or Facebook?

It's a common conception that everybody finds everything online via a Google search. According to research by Parse.ly, though, this is actually far from the case. All told, the lion's share of referral traffic comes from Facebook (although it should be noted that Google AMP is not included in the analysis).

Where the picture becomes a little less clear is when we break down the referrals by topic. Lifestyle page referrals, for example, are dominated by Facebook (87 percent) whereas people generally find job postings through Google Search (84 percent).

Facebook itself came under fire during and after the U.S. presidential election for allowing so-called fake news to circulate freely on its site. With 59 percent of referrals to pages on this topic in 2016 coming from the social network, the political power of Mark Zuckerberg's company is clear to see.