Our website is technically sound and crawled every day by both Google and Bing — yet Google indexes a single page of it, and Bing almost none. This is what happens when two companies decide which local journalism you are allowed to find.
If you have ever tried to find a Kent Local News story by searching for it on Google, you have probably failed. That is not your mistake, and — as far as we can establish — it is not a fault on our website. It is a fact of modern publishing that almost nobody outside the industry sees: the two search engines that decide what most people read have, between them, made this newsroom nearly impossible to find.
We think you should understand how that happens, because it affects you every bit as much as it affects us.
What the evidence shows
The picture from our own data and the search companies’ own tools is stark and consistent:
- Google indexes exactly one page of our website — the homepage — out of well over a thousand published articles. Since late March 2026 that number has sat at one and has not moved.
- Bing shows virtually none of the site at all, not even reliably the homepage.
- This is not because the search engines cannot reach us. Their automated crawlers visit us every single day and are served a fast, clean, fully working page — we have checked the server logs. Bing’s crawler alone requested our pages more than 200 times in a single week and received a normal “200 OK” response every time.
- Our site is correctly built by every technical measure the search companies themselves publish: an open crawler file, valid sitemaps, correct canonical tags, no blocking, no errors.
In plain terms: the door is open, the search engines walk in and look around every day — and then choose to show their users almost nothing of what they found.
This is not a technical glitch
There is a distinction most readers never need to know, but it matters here. Being crawled — visited by a search engine’s software — is not the same as being indexed, or listed in the results. Google’s own published guidance states plainly that it “doesn’t guarantee that it will crawl, index, or serve your page, even if your page follows” its standards. The decision to include a page, or to leave it out, is made by ranking and quality systems that are secret, automated, and — for a small publisher — offer no meaningful route of appeal.
We are a young, independent outlet. We do not have the years of domain history, the web of links from other big sites, or the corporate weight of the national media groups whose stories fill the results when you search for Kent news. Under the systems Google and Bing now run, that appears to be enough to keep a newsroom like ours off the shelf almost entirely, however sound the journalism on it.
We are not the only ones
Our own numbers are severe, but they are the sharp end of something happening to independent journalism everywhere. According to Press Gazette, which tracks the news industry, publishers lost roughly a third of their Google search traffic over the course of 2025, and the majority of the UK’s largest news sites fell in the rankings. Google’s rollout of AI-generated answers at the top of the results — which lift publishers’ words but often remove the reason to click through — has accelerated the decline. The outlets with the least leverage feel it first and worst, and few have less leverage than a young, independent, local title.
Our view — and where we deliberately stop short
We want to be careful here, because accuracy is the whole point of what we do. We cannot see inside Google’s or Bing’s systems. We do not allege — and we hold no evidence — that either company set out deliberately to silence Kent Local News. What we can say is this: the effect is the same as if they had.
An independent, regulated newsroom doing original reporting in its own community can be rendered all but invisible by the private, unaccountable decisions of two of the largest companies on earth — with no explanation offered and no real right of reply. That should trouble anyone who cares about local news, whatever they make of us. When a handful of gatekeepers decide which journalism reaches the public, the public quietly loses the ability to choose for itself. And the stories that vanish first are rarely the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. They are the small, local, independent ones. Ours.
How to make sure you never lose us
There is a straightforward answer, and it puts the choice back in your hands rather than an algorithm’s:
- Sign up for our free Kent Morning Briefing. The day’s Kent news, sent straight to your inbox — no search engine sits between us and you.
- Follow us where you already are — on Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and our WhatsApp channel.
- Bookmark the site and come to us directly at kentlocalnews.co.uk.
- Tell a neighbour. Word of mouth is the one distribution channel no company can switch off.
If enough people do these simple things, no ranking change and no quiet decision in a distant data centre can take Kent Local News away from the community it reports on. We will keep doing the journalism. All we ask is that you keep a direct line to it.
Sources
- Press Gazette — industry reporting on publishers’ falling search-engine traffic through 2025.
- Google Search Central — Google’s own documentation confirming that crawling and indexing are not guaranteed.
- About Kent Local News and our corrections policy.