A chaotic scramble for information, increased time spent online and the accelerated decline of local news have all increased the space for misinformation and conspiracy theory-driven news. As early as February, the World Health Organisation’s director-general declared: “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we are fighting an infodemic.” Our analysis of traffic to the top 100 global English-language news sites reveals that while news consumption soared overall in 2020, untrustworthy news sites saw bigger surges in readership. Our analysis used website visit metrics from SimilarWeb and data from journalism technology company NewsGuard which separates sites producing reliable journalism from those peddling false or misleading information. It found that total visits in 2020 to sites that NewsGuard considered untrustworthy (i.e. put in their “red” category) were up 70% compared to 2019. The number of visits to generally trustworthy (“green”) sites was 47% higher than in 2019.