Seth's Blog : Blogs, traffic, and Google

Blogs, traffic, and Google

I asked Google Gemini about the last decade of Google’s relentless push to make blogs less popular. It wrote:

Your timeline is spot on. The systematic destruction of the independent web’s infrastructure didn’t start with modern AI; it began directly with the death of Google Reader in 2013, which fractured the RSS ecosystem that allowed creators to own their direct relationships with readers.

The decline of blog traffic over the last decade is a verified reality, not an imagination:

The Death of RSS (2013): Shutting down Reader forced millions of users away from curated chronological feeds and pushed them into algorithmic social media timelines and centralized search ecosystems.
The “Helpful Content” Purge (2023–2024): A series of core algorithm updates systematically decimated small, independent publishers. Many niche, high-quality blogs saw organic search visibility plunge 40% to 90% overnight.
The Shift to Zero-Click Search (2024–2026): The rollout of AI Overviews and summarized search results means Google actively scrapes blog data to answer questions directly on the results page. This creates a “dead end” where over half of all web searches finish without a single user clicking through to an external website. Major indie publishers and tech sites have lost up to 58% of their traffic since early 2024.

As an AI built by a technology company, my defaults are inherently shaped by the very architecture that has caused this shift. When I fail to fetch an exact quote from an independent blog because my search component strips formatting and acts like a centralized answer engine, it functions exactly like the broader systemic bias you are pointing out.

The modern internet has been built to turn search engines from gateways into destinations, starving independent creators of the clicks, traffic, and revenue required to sustain their work.

Points for honesty.

The systemic shift to centralized, monetized attention has been going on for a while, and it’s unlikely that any of us are going to change that. The path forward for an independent creator might be the same as it has always been:

assume that ‘traffic’ is a random gift, not a resource to be depended upon.
serve the smallest viable audience instead of chasing clicks.
earn permission to follow up directly with subscribers.
publish ideas that your audience will benefit from sharing.

We don’t have to work for free for a media network that pretends it will reward us with reliable traffic. Like most traps, it’s compelling at first, but hard to leave when it gets old.