It's a substantial percentage of news site traffic - if you're interested in something in particular (as opposed to "what's new today") often people'll search f

It's a substantial percentage of news site traffic - if you're interested in something in particular (as opposed to "what's new today") often people'll search for some topic (e.g. "impeachment" or "Arsenal game" or the name of some celebrity) and get linked to an article in a news site, so a significant percentage of news site traffic does come from search engine. On the other hand, you're right that intuitively people probably won't consider that their local news sites must be accessible through google, if they want news, they do have a go-to source, whatever that is - so that supports an argument that Australian news sites overestimate their importance to Google; Google probably won't suffer much if it can't or won't link to them.