Meta’s change in approach to political content appears to be driving more referral traffic from the platform once again, with new data showing that total referral traffic from the app is up 74% year-over-year for some of the biggest publisher sites.

According to new analysis conducted by Similarweb, and shared with Press Gazette, Meta’s revised approach to political and news topics has now reopened its referral traffic taps once again, which could bode well for those looking to use Facebook to attract an audience.

As per Press Gazette:

“The share of total desktop social referral traffic coming from Facebook increased at 75% of the 68 biggest news websites in the world in March. Overall social referrals on desktop and mobile web traffic increased year on year at 48% of the 68 websites.”

As you can see in this chart, overall, Facebook referral traffic has declined significantly from what it had been in 2022 for these big publisher sites.

Meta actually began exploring restrictions on “political” content in 2021, in the wake of the Capitol riots, based on both rising political polarization, as well as feedback from users that their feeds were becoming overwhelmed with too much division and angst.

Alongside this, various governments have also sought to implement revenue-share programs that force Meta to pay local publishers for news content shared in its apps. And given the relative rise of AI-recommended Reels, focused on entertainment over newsworthiness, Meta saw an opportunity to distance itself from political news entirely, and avoid these complications.

That saw Meta scale back political content recommendations significantly, which eventually resulted in its active restriction of all political posts across its apps.

Which has also cut referral traffic.

Indeed, according to Meta’s latest “Widely Viewed Content” report, 97.9% of the views of Facebook posts in the U.S. during Q4 2024 did not include a link to a source outside of Facebook itself.

That’s up from 86.5% in Q3 2021, which, at Meta’s massive scale, is a huge impact on the broader digital ecosystem.

But now, things are trending up, which may see Facebook driving more traffic to your site once again.

Maybe.

It’s hard to say whether this trend will trickle through to all sites and links, or whether Meta’s only allowing certain sites and publishers to gain more traction via links.

The data also shows that while some news sites have seen big gains, others have not, and it could be that only certain discussions are going to see a marked increase as a result of Meta’s refocus.

But it’s something to watch, and it could help to put more focus on Facebook once again as a traffic-driving source. And with over 3 billion users, it could be a highly valuable driver, if indeed Meta does enable link posts to get more reach once again.

You can check out Press Gazette’s full report here.