Blogs Stopped Getting Traffic After AI Rewrote Search
Bloggers across various niches are experiencing difficulty attracting and retaining an audience, despite consistent effort and sometimes, adherence to SEO best practices. Many feel their content is lost in the noise, and are questioning the effectiveness of current strategies, alongside concerns about content quality and language barriers.
SOURCES (60)
“I’m struggling out here too so commenting, interested to see what advice others can give”
“My situation is a little weird. My day job is B2B marketing and I also practice physical therapy, so when I started thinking seriously about blogging I kept going back and forth between content marketing topics and PT/wellness stuff. Eventually I just... started both. Which in hindsight was maybe not the smartest traffic strategy The thing is, both audiences are real to me. I know the material. But splitting energy between two totally separate niches feels like it slows everything down, especial”
“I started inquiring to outlets in my niches categories, and while 1 has rejected my article without explanation, 3 others have offered me paid articles & link placement! Are these paid articles/links on niche-related high domain authority sites worth it? I told myself I'm staying at my 9-5 to spare no expense on growing my business, but dont want to throw away money at publications bait-and-switching me. submitted by /u/Known_Grocery4434 [link] [comments]”
“I graduated in new media journalism and went into corporate communications. You speak the truth about the impact of the digital space in the journalism industry.. I am curious, have you done research into your competition? It might be worthwhile to see what you are up against and guage your resources in what may be the best direction. If you see a gap for your platform journalocity to thrive, then by all means, but if you studied the comp and the gap aint there, its no good. I wouldnt mind worki”
“With that little traffic none of those changes could have shown up as anything anyway. I kept a text file for a while with the exact headline each week and the signups written next to it, and at about 40 visitors a week the numbers were noise, which is what finally got me to leave the thing alone.”
“Most people will tell you to focus on posting volume but that is a trap fr. If your profile is not optimized to convert attention into actual users every single post is just wasted effort. One question.. Are you trying to build a generic audience or get paying users for your SaaS right now?”
“There is always a BUT. Create a successful blog and it will pay you passive income while you sleep. Create a series of instruction videos and it will pay you while you sleep. Create a e-commerce site and it will sell products while you sleep. BUT, as you already know, that's not the case. You have to write blog posts, you have to research SEO, you have to pay people to write th post for you, manage the blog, manage advertisements, etc. You have to record videos, you have to write the script,”
“My blog sits at this odd intersection of parenting and career stuff (think: what happens to your professional identity when you voluntarily leave the workforce to raise kids, which is a topic approximately eleven people care about, and I include myself in that count). Traffic is basically decorative at this point. A few dozen sessions a month, mostly me checking if Google has noticed me yet (it has not) The thing I keep wondering is whether a hyperspecific niche is a liability or secretly an adv”
“I did the same thing and kept it running (2.5 years now). Only do this if it's a passion and labour of love, you'll make no money out of it.”
“sounds like you need a cms that can handle both content and user roles without blowing the budget, and wordpress can definitely pull that off with the right plugins. bbpress for the forum, some membership plugin to manage the participant/moderator/admin tiers, and you're pretty much set for the community side. custom build from an agency would be cleaner long-term but you're looking at 15-30k minimum depending on scope, whereas wordpress could be a few thousand upfront plus hosting and m”
“right now i have it as #1 on my activity list, but I’ve heard that having an online blog as #1 isn’t necessarily the strongest look to provide context: 200+ subscribers and 5k+ impressions, related to my major, hosted on two different platforms, publish findings through blog posts and interactive dashboards as a part of it i started it junior year because i didn’t really know what I was passionate about until then would this be considered strong enough to have as #1? submitted by /u/”
“Thank you! That's great advice. So far I've been focused on my own grievances and needs but I need to check if I share them with others.”
“I got a sudden surge in traffic to my blog overnight last night and I'm not sure if it's because I beefed up my content creation on social media (and put my website on all of it), because I posted more of what I think are evergreen content pillars, or if they're just bots. Tbh if you say bots, I wouldn't be all that shocked lol. They're from a ton of different countries, like ones that I've never even heard of, and they all seem to be only looking at one post each. No com”
“Is blogging dead, or can I still monetize a traditional blog? I keep telling myself I can make money online, but it’s definitely not that easy. submitted by /u/AbaloneUnlikely6565 [link] [comments]”
“Hey good people! I've 5+ years in content marketing, currently doing content strategy and CRO work, mostly with SaaS clients. On the side, I write a personal finance/behavioral finance newsletter, and I've been actively investing since 2022, so markets aren't unfamiliar territory to me. I want to move into finance for real now, and two directions keep pulling me: Financial writing/research — bylines at finance publications, maybe working toward equity-research-adjacent writing Produc”
“I have made a survey, and I did some outreach, but clearly not to the level that I should've.”
“Quick disclaimer: most of it is open source, that's the whole point. I've been running content across LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Reddit and a weekly Blog + some youtube, for a while now and I was spending around 8h/week on it but probably like 5h of those were just me scrolling feeds pretending it was research or StAyiNg oN tOp of things or whatever excuse I had:)) Anyway, i got fed up with it eventually, i mean doomscrolling for good content to engage, so i set up an Obsidian vault where I”
“Hey, so I’ve been running a small niche product review site for about a year (Amazon Associates is a big part of how I monetize it), and while blog traffic > Amazon is decent , I feel like I’m missing a huge opportunity by not doing more external stuff (YT, email, that kind of thing) I’ve tried: Posting on Pinterest (barely any traction) YouTube shorts (some CTR, but hard to scale) Instagram reels with product links in bio (Amazon seems to hate it) I’m also paranoid about getting flagged by A”
“That makes total sense - WordPress would fight you on template consistency every time. Given what you've said (keep your exact templates, but give a non-technical person a Facebook-simple posting UI), the pattern a few others here are converging on is probably your best bet: a static site generator (11ty, Astro, or Hugo) paired with a git-based headless CMS like Decap or PagesCMS. Your templates stay exactly as they are since the SSG just renders your existing markup, and the CMS gives your”
“Cant help you much on X sorry, I barely use it. Tried it early on, got nothing out of it, stopped. The thing that actually shifted anything for me was going where people were already asking the question, instead of writing something and hoping it gets found. Twenty minutes answering someone who has the exact problem your thing solves, rather than an afternoon on a piece nobody reads. You also find out pretty quick whether anyone cares, which the article route never really tells you. Wouldnt bin”
“i’m curious what traffic sources are working for bloggers right now. search used to seem like the obvious answer, but there are so many other options now. reddit, pinterest, newsletters, youtube, social media, direct traffic and communities can all send people to a blog for those who have been blogging for a while, which source brings you the most consistent traffic? submitted by /u/AdOrnery4511 [link] [comments]”
“i’m curious what traffic sources are working for bloggers right now. search used to seem like the obvious answer, but there are so many other options now. reddit, pinterest, newsletters, youtube, social media, direct traffic and communities can all send people to a blog for those who have been blogging for a while, which source brings you the most consistent traffic? submitted by /u/AdOrnery4511 [link] [comments]”
“i used to think blogging was mostly about constantly publishing new content. but the more i look at older posts, the more i realise that some of them could probably perform much better with updated information, better formatting or a clearer title now i’m wondering whether spending time improving existing content is more valuable than always creating something new what works better for you: updating old posts or publishing new ones? submitted by /u/DeerAggravating2373 [link] [c”
“Except the use of WordPress isn't the route I want to go. I would be stuck using their templates for the UI and it would break the consistency I'm going for. Plus, I already have a main blog page and post page templates that I want to use, and WordPress wouldn't play nice with using those.”
“Echoing some other advice here, I use PagesCMS with Markdown files and Astro as my framework. It's perfect for blogs and gives you a UI for free for client to add their own content.”
“You should space them out and maybe post 2/3 a month at most. Also try to tailor some of the content or headings to what’s trending or relevant at that time for quicker effect (if that’s what you want)”
“I'm a blogger looking to grow my readership. What strategies actually work? Any platforms or tactics you'd recommend? submitted by /u/Easternalpha4997 [link] [comments]”
“Totally depends on the current stack of the website. If you’re dealing with static HTML, then tools like Eleventy or Hugo can run your blog posts as markdown files, super straightforward. But if it’s a JavaScript framework kind of thing, then Astro usually handles this really well, and with minimal setup too.”
“I think I need some opinions. As you can see, I have a blog and many posts. I have to admit it is not easy to write after so many years; I feel like I said EVERYTHING. What do you think about it? Should I continue this? Or maybe create something new? submitted by /u/PetiteEmBlog [link] [comments]”
“Two years into blogging seriously and I keep bumping into this question that nobody seems to answer honestly. The advice everywhere is just write more, publish consistently, show up. And I believed it. I set a schedule, hit it most weeks, and watched my traffic do basically nothing for about eight months. What actually moved things was not volume. It was one post that somehow connected, got shared in a couple of newsletters, and dragged the rest of the site up with it. Which makes me wonder if t”
“It totally depends on your aim. Do you want to have informational content or transactional that will help you convert. Then you need to research your topic and keywords to check how your competitors cover it.”
“Ok so I got my first sale and wasnt running ads... mau e my tiktok got someone's attention or my blogs SEO. I have about 8 blogs written how should I just pump these out? What blog how to videos do yall recommend? submitted by /u/Substantial-Song-841 [link] [comments]”
“my new blog I started in late may this year, has been growing consistently in organic traffic and ai assistants, in a specific DYI niche, based on Wordpress and using AI for writing. but suddenly after the 17th august all is gone, i thought it's because of the problem GSC has in this day ( https://searchenginewatch.com/google-search-console-data-recovering-after-logging-issue/ ) but the drop is persisting. do you had the same issue after the 17 august? is it because of the ai ? or others ? a”
“This is when I use brave browser. I don't see the same in the app. submitted by /u/theepi_pillodu [link] [comments]”
“Hey, thank you so much for responding. I understand that really makes sense. It does take a reasonable amount of time to draft, rewrite and rewrite an article until you like it. And that's why I was wondering if I should keep going down this route before trying to do something else. What about X?”
“Ahhh I do like the categorization aspect.... the bridge in my head that im having trouble wrapping my head around is turning the random google search into my page suggestion Example: Jake Snow address Google result: WhitePages Jake Snow, address: 44 west........ That could be a one of searcher, so it's hard to say a "traffic" producing page vs the pages I already made for SEO funnels into my search engine. I like the quality threshold approach because some of the data is limited th”
“Probably not worth a ton of time but I have found that having a few explainer or 101 posts that are evergreen and I can share with potential clients has been really helpful. I own a consulting company, working with other businesses and this makes it easier to explain the complexities of what we do. It also means that if anyone is googling for a 101 on a certain topic, our posts come up. Otherwise, I'm envisioning our blog as a way to make our mission and values clear, which matters for some”
“Was pointless before and it’s still pointless, except in the case where a business has a constantly changing inventory.”
“Blogging still gets recommended to local businesses all the time, but with all the changes happening around SEO and in the way people search, should it be? A plumber, dentist, contractor, etc. can only publish so many “5 tips” articles before it starts feeling like just creating content for the sake of content… So, would that effort be better spent on stronger service pages, FAQs, project examples, local resources, photos, or short videos? Don’t get us wrong, we love blogs, and they certainly do”
“I’m working on an AI blogging Agent and exploring how Blog writers are actually publishing their content today. And I would like to know Which blogging platform/CMS do you use to publish your content like WordPress, Strapi? Would be helpful if you could drop the platform you use in the comments. submitted by /u/Accomplished-Toe3417 [link] [comments]”
“We have a blog with about 500 posts, many are over 3 years old and aren't ranking for much and receive very little traffic, if any. We had an SEO agency that said we should at some point clean up the old posts as we only get a certain amount of "Google juice" per site and right now it's being split across all those old posts as well as the new better optimised posts. So hurting out ability to get ranked for the new/better stuff. TLDR; at what point should we start deleting/arch”
“I have been running destination specific sites (travel sites/travel guides) etc. this was many years ago, and I was getting traffic. 2010 to 2016. They were quite successful. For some reasons I abandoned them. Now I have been running a very similar travel site/blog since 2018 and I am totally struggling getting traffic (still around 500 page views a month) despite there's a relevant amount of high quality content with much more attention to SEO. What is your experience and have you noticed s”
“I’ve been experimenting with this idea lately. Instead of treating every piece of content as a completely separate project, I’m wondering how much you can actually get from one strong article. For example: 1 blog post → a few social posts → a discussion/question → a visual → another article angle. Do you do this intentionally, or do you prefer keeping each piece completely separate? I’m curious how other bloggers approach this without making the content feel repetitive. submitted by”
“I only just recently got into blogging and wanted other people to read it. But I don't know where to advertise myself. where do most people advertise themselves or have seen others advertise submitted by /u/Tight-Foot-7530 [link] [comments]”
“AI can write almost any blog post now. But my problem is deciding what is actually worth writing. I still spend a lot of time checking Google Trends, Reddit, search questions and other sources to see what people actually care about. So I’m thinking of building a small tool that uses my website keywords and audience to find good topic opportunities from these sources. Would something like this be useful to you? How do you find topics today? submitted by /u/ZawTin [link] [comment”
“AI can write almost any blog post now. But my problem is deciding what is actually worth writing. I still spend a lot of time checking Google Trends, Reddit, search questions and other sources to see what people actually care about. So I’m thinking of building a small tool that uses my website keywords and audience to find good topic opportunities from these sources. Would something like this be useful to you? How do you find topics today? submitted by /u/ZawTin [link] [comment”
“I need help from SEO community. For the last three months, my blogs are getting high impressions—from 140,000 a month to 50,000 a week. However, the click through rate is abysmal. A few blogs with impressions over 1 lakhs have 0.2% ctr, while others with same impressions have 0.3% to 0.7% ctr. I am not able to understand what's going on. We consistently rank on the first page for targetted keywords, beating IBM, Palo Alto, Crowdstrike, etc., and yet the ctr never crossed even 1 percentage po”
“just anything you can share. i have a lot of content made but it's all disorganised and so is my head EDIT: im talking more specifically about how you organise your posting for example: when you do a new photo session, do you only post that until you finish and then continue with the next session our you mix everything up? if you do more than one niche, you just keep posting the content all mixed up? how many pics per post? etc. like what are your DOs and DONTs i know i have to find my own w”
“I used to spend hours on content research before anyone even started writing. Check what's ranking, figure out the right angle, brief a writer, wait, edit, publish. Then do it again. Every week. One day it hit me, the actual writing was the easy part. The research was eating all the time. So I built something to do that part for me. Give it a keyword, and it checks what's ranking right now, picks the right kind of post for it, and writes a full draft. Before it writes anything, I feed it”
“I would like to know how you decide whether you are writing a blog about a specific product or service, or for any other purpose which topic to choose in order to improve its ranking. How do you go about this decision? What research methods do you use to find a topic that would be beneficial for improving the ranking of that product or service? Whenever I have to write a blog post related to my product or service, I often feel confused about what to write and how to conduct the research needed t”
“I’m researching a problem and would love some honest feedback from people who create content regularly. If you have a blog, SaaS, newsletter, or business website: • How do you turn your articles/pages into social media visuals? • Do you create them manually in Canva/Figma, use AI tools, or outsource them? • What takes the most time? • Do you struggle to keep the visuals consistent with your brand? • What would make this process significantly easier? I’m not selling anything — just trying to unde”
“About the "why not googling it one more time" thing The information (text, images, etc.) may not always be there for you forever. One day Google just doesn't show it to you at the same place anymore, or the page itself is now dead. This is from my direct experience. They may be no one ultimate source that answers your specific question. If you had a problem once, and you have compiled all the info into a ready-to-use note, you don't have to figure out all the steps again when l”
“As the title suggests, I’d be curious to hear about your experiences specifically, whether you initially treated it as a serious job or as something to do alongside your main line of work submitted by /u/JustCodeMark [link] [comments]”
“I’ve ran a blog for around 6 years now. It peaked 4 years ago with 100k visits a month. Sadly the days of that kind of traffic have gone now, but the site still gets visits every day. It’s in maintenance mode at the moment, I’ve written or commissioned around 500 articles on the niche over the years. I’m a software engineer by trade (not my website niche topic btw) and have considered creating a tool that writes articles via AI and then publishes them automatically. No human involvement, pretty”