Surprised? Yahoo Sites Beat Google's Web Traffic

It might come as a surprise given the perception of Google's dominance, but Yahoo!, which has for years been struggling to keep up, surpassed the Web giant in terms of U.S. traffic for its sites -- a first since May 2011.

ComScore, a metric tracking service, released its ranking of U.S. Web activity for July 2013 Wednesday with Yahoo's numbers coming in at more than 196.56 million compared to Google sites' about 192.25 million.

The Yahoo logo is displayed in front of the Yahoo headqarters on July 17, 2012 in Sunnyvale, Calif. (Getty Images/Justin Sullivan)

Some were attributing these high numbers to Yahoo's recent acquisition of Tumblr, but comScore clarified to Marketing Land that Tumblr is not included in Yahoo! sites yet. If you take a look at comScore's chart, you can see how Tumblr is still considered separate.

comScore's top 50 chart ranks Yahoo sites above Google sites for the first time in two years. (Image: ComScore)

"[It] seems there are other factors at play, and given how close Yahoo Sites and Google have been in recent months it can likely just be normal seasonal/month-to-month fluctuations," comScore told Marketing Land in a statement.

Still, CEO Marissa Mayer has been making many changes to drum up traffic for Yahoo's products after she came on board last summer.

CNN pointed out that comScore's metrics account for desktop traffic only, meaning mobile traffic is not included.

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