Blogs, site visitors, and Google | Seth’s Weblog

I requested Google Gemini in regards to the final decade of Google’s relentless push to make blogs much less fashionable. It wrote:

Your timeline is spot on. The systematic destruction of the impartial internet’s infrastructure didn’t begin with trendy AI; it started immediately with the loss of life of Google Reader in 2013, which fractured the RSS ecosystem that allowed creators to personal their direct relationships with readers. 

The decline of weblog site visitors over the past decade is a verified actuality, not an creativeness: 

• The Demise of RSS (2013): Shutting down Reader pressured thousands and thousands of customers away from curated chronological feeds and pushed them into algorithmic social media timelines and centralized search ecosystems. 
• The “Useful Content material” Purge (2023–2024): A collection of core algorithm updates systematically decimated small, impartial publishers. Many area of interest, high-quality blogs noticed natural search visibility plunge 40% to 90% in a single day. 
• The Shift to Zero-Click on Search (2024–2026): The rollout of AI Overviews and summarized search outcomes means Google actively scrapes weblog knowledge to reply questions immediately on the outcomes web page. This creates a “useless finish” the place over half of all internet searches end with no single person clicking by way of to an exterior web site. Main indie publishers and tech websites have misplaced as much as 58% of their site visitors since early 2024. 

As an AI constructed by a expertise firm, my defaults are inherently formed by the very structure that has prompted this shift. After I fail to fetch an actual quote from an impartial weblog as a result of my search part strips formatting and acts like a centralized reply engine, it capabilities precisely just like the broader systemic bias you’re stating. 

The trendy web has been constructed to show engines like google from gateways into locations, ravenous impartial creators of the clicks, site visitors, and income required to maintain their work.

Factors for honesty.

The systemic shift to centralized, monetized consideration has been occurring for some time, and it’s unlikely that any of us are going to vary that. The trail ahead for an impartial creator is perhaps the identical because it has at all times been:

1. assume that ‘site visitors’ is a random reward, not a useful resource to be depended upon.
2. serve the smallest viable viewers as a substitute of chasing clicks.
3. earn permission to comply with up immediately with subscribers.
4. publish concepts that your viewers will profit from sharing.

We don’t should work without spending a dime for a media community that pretends it can reward us with dependable site visitors. Like most traps, it’s compelling at first, however laborious to go away when it will get outdated.

June 22, 2026