The Great Blogging Collapse - What Happened to 100 Successful Blogs?

Daniel Stanica analyzed 100 blogs over 4 years + tracked the aftermath of Google's HCU and AI Overviews. 85% lost Google traffic, 11 were gutted, but interestingly, a few actually grew.



Google Sheet with the list of 100 blogs and traffic metrics:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q7KcGcFnfvwoBRZW2ir2-hfOh-zVmLIOS_P6PJdzAbc/

Key Takeaways:

• Experience that can’t be AI-summarized became the biggest competitive advantage: recipes, DIY projects, travel experiences.
• Search should be treated as an acquisition channel within the broader marketing mix, not as the business itself.
• The era of building websites solely for Google traffic and monetizing them through ads and affiliate marketing has ended.

It's a great read if you consider blogging as a career or planning to start a new blog:
https://danielstanica.com/posts/Great-Blogging-Collapse

The ones that are in green-growing are either food recipe, parenting or travel, interesting data.

IM Dude said:

The ones that are in green-growing are either food recipe, parenting or travel, interesting data.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's what I noticed too. Basically, whatever AI can't steal survives. The informational posts that AI can steal and repurpose for user intent will eventually die. AI will eventually get information from News and UGC from social media platforms. News outlets are already taking legal action for stealing their content for training AI models and users are finding misleading UGC showing up in AI overviews.

The author points out that almost all blogs that relied on organic traffic from Google without a dedicated following eventually died, confirming that Google is an unreliable traffic source for blogs.