I've been taking a deep dive under the hood of my blog recently, looking at things like structured data, plugins, and indexing speed—stuff I haven't really touched in years.

We're in a massive AI megatrend right now, and it reminds me a lot of the skepticism around social media back in 2008 and 2009, it's not going anywhere and is only going to grow.

With search evolving so much and AI engines becoming more prominent, I'm realizing how important it is to make sure these elements are set up correctly so machines can actually read and use our content.

I'd love to hear from other bloggers.

Have any of you audited your site's backend recently to keep up with AI search?

What technical adjustments have you found actually make a difference in getting found?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what to focus on!

Angela Brooks.

So early last year I got chased by the police and ended up flipping my car 5 or 6 times and went to jail. Long story short... I started The Break Away Experience while in jail that time. My blog has been around now since February 9th 2025 and I only have 3 followers.

Not only am I terrible at marketing, but I also feel weird when I do occasionally promote my blog.

I never expect, nor do I want money, from my blog. It's just that I want to be heard. I recently reignited The Break Away Experience, but it's 2.0 now. The original is scrapped. It's a wrap.

Now that I'm not smoking crack, not trying to start a cult, starting school, and so close to getting out of the homeless shelter I think my blog might get better and I'd like to share the journey with others. I know there's others like me, probably a lot, and I'd like to hear from them.

I recently figured out how to reply to comments and now my desire to communicate is peaking.

I would like some advice on how to get views and followers and comments. Hearing personal experience from you guys would be HIGHLY appreciated as well. What has worked for you?

I'm done talking to only myself.

Any suggestions are appreciated. Even if it's just to say I'm insane. I'm very new to this. Reddit is the only social media I have so I don't know what platforms to even use for blogs. Open to anything other than TikTok.

Thanks.

There is this weird phase early on where you write something, hit publish, and immediately wonder if it was too short, too long, the wrong topic, the wrong angle. Then you check traffic and it confirms nothing because there is barely any. So you just sit with the doubt.

I kept rewriting old posts instead of writing new ones. Spent three weeks tweaking one article that maybe twelve people had ever read. Looking back that was probably just anxiety dressed up as productivity.

At some point something shifted and I stopped caring as much about whether each individual post was perfect before moving on. The blogs that actually seem to grow are the ones where the writer just kept going, not the ones where every post gets polished to death.

Curious whether that clicked for other people at a specific moment or if it was more gradual. Did hitting some traffic milestone help, or did it happen before that? Because right now my traffic is still pretty low and I am trying to figure out if the confidence comes first or if the numbers have to move before the doubt quiets down.

I have been a blogger for years, mostly as a way to communicate with others. Not interested in monetization or collecting followers. My attitude is that those who can benefit will find it.

One of my biggest pet peeves about blogging online has been the pressure to add images and videos. I think they are distracting and disable readers imaginations and ability to form their own mental images.

I moved my blog to a new platform, changed my approach, and posted. Sent the link to a friend who wrote back and said there is nothing there, just a bunch of words.

Next???

I'm really sad to share this but it is what it is. My Pinterest account of over 5 years recently faced a massive traffic drop. Nearly 3 months ago from today, the drop started to happen but after a few days, the traffic would climb back up. Then go down again after 10-12 days, then come back after a few days. This process continued on repeat for over 2 months.

But last week, a massive drop happened. My traffic dropped from 20K impressions a day before to 500 impressions the next day. Literally the very next day. Now, from the last 5-6 days, I've been getting around 500 impressions per day and it doesn't seem to go back up like it did in the previous drops.

Before the traffic drop, I was making around $200/month just from ads alone, but now it has gone to basically zero. I was posting consistently and all pins were made manually by me, myself. No AI at all.

So the thing I want to ask is:
I've around 150 completely human written articles on my blog. The fact that this drop doesn't seem to come back up, should I start a new blog and transfer all my current blog posts to it? Because there seems to be no way out. I believe my domain has been flagged as "spam" or "non-trustworthy" in Pinterest's system (but they haven't banned my links as spam. I can still post my links as usual). So, there seems to be no point to keep posting on it.

I also sent an email to Pinterest support regarding this matter and they say "there's nothing flagged from our end"....that same generic bot reply. So, what should I do? I need some genuine suggestions.

If I start a new blog & if I have to transfer all my articles to a new blog, how do I do it? Should I first de-index all those blogs from Search engines? Or how do I go about it?

Btw, I don't get any traffic from SEO at all because I never focused on it. I wrote all these articles because I genuinely loved writing.

Hey-hey, could you please share if you had any issues with bot fight mode / super bot fight mode on your display ads website. I currently have it off, cause in the past it blocked some of google's bots, and now I am considering it again

I created this Amazon affiliate website in 2020 during covid and it made $800-$1000 per month till 2021. But later due to algorithm change and commission cut, overall income from the site reduced. It has around 40 articles and still makes $30-$40 per month. I haven't maintained it in years. I believe, if in good hand, it can return to its previous glory. Will sell it for x30. Let me know if you are interested.[ I am not able to attach screenshot, no options]

so I've been running a little blog for about 2 years now. nothing huge, maybe 3k subs. and for the longest time I just... didn't send newsletters. like at all. the thought of exporting csvs, setting up mailchimp, designing some html monstrosity that breaks on mobile - it just felt like a whole separate job

Then a few weeks ago I randomly stumbled on yaplet's newsletter thing while looking for something else entirely. turns out because I already use their chat widget, all my contacts were just... there. No export. no csv gymnastics. just hit send.

Sent my first one last tuesday. ugly email, two paragraphs, one link to a blog post. 41% open rate. FORTY ONE.

I think we've been gaslit into thinking email marketing needs to be this whole production. design teams. templates. "brand guidelines" for a damn email. When really people just wanna read something that doesn't look like it was crafted by a committee of 12 marketers

anyway not trying to make this a whole thing. just wild how much friction we add to simple stuff. anyone else overcomplicate their blog's email setup for way too long?

Got made redundant earlier of the year, was put on gardening leave and got a good payoff. Decided to start a travel blog (targeting UK residents) showcasing how to use points & miles for travel, how to get discounts on trains, research on things like airport shop pricing and also how to maximise the benefits from work travel.

Blog launched properly on 1 June here are the stats so far.

Active users

Google Search Console

I do get a spike in traffic when I spend time replying to people on Facebook and X but have spent more time recently focusing on SEO and internal linking and have seen impressions and position improve in recent weeks.

Strategy is to write some interesting, well researched articles and then over time move into affiliates and the credit card referrals space to generate some income. However, at this point, I am just trying to drive site visits. I currently have 40 articles on my site and each article takes about a day to write.

Like many new bloggers, I am missing backlinks and have tried sending out press releases of some on my stories but no luck yet. I am now sending out my stuff to the companies I have featured to see if I can get some traction that way.

I struggle to find the time to trawl social media for articles to reply to, even though that has driven traffic. Does anyone have any best practice to share here?

Also any comments on the stats? Numbers are still low but I have had my best day of organic traffic today (22 users, 28 page views).

My plugins were doing less than I assumed. I thought the SEO plugin covered the technical side. It covered maybe half, and the half it skipped was the half that decides how well an AI engine can read the page.

My structured data was incomplete. Google is forgiving about that and fills in the gaps from context. AI engines are not. They use what is explicitly declared and ignore the rest, so anything missing is just a fact about you that never gets used.

My content was written for skimming, not for lifting. A direct answer in the first two or three sentences of a section is what gets pulled into an answer. Long warmups bury it where nothing can reach it.

My indexing was slower than it needed to be. There is a whole layer of getting a new post noticed in hours instead of days and I had none of it turned on.

And I had no way of knowing whether any of it was working. That was the real problem. I guessed for years.

The audit itself is the part most people skip, so I will say how I did it. I had Gemini crawl my site and tell me what it could and could not read, which gave me the list of what was actually broken instead of what I assumed was broken.

Then I used Claude to build out the back end pieces I needed, the structured data and the settings I did not want to hand code myself. Two tools, one to find the problems and one to fix them.

Since the first of May, about 2,700 people have come through the blog and they are averaging two pages each. That second part is what I actually care about. They land and they keep going instead of bouncing off. That started after I fixed the setup, not after I changed anything about the writing.

None of this is writing advice. The writing was fine. It was everything under the writing that I had never looked at.

If you have never audited your own setup, that is not a knock. Most people never do. I only did it because the search landscape changed enough that I wanted to know where I stood.

A thank you, and a look at the numbers.

https://david.alvarezrosa.com/posts/one-hundred-thousand-reads/

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I’ve been running my blog for ten months now, and despite putting out consistent posts, I haven’t seen much traffic growth at all. Looking at my Google Analytics, my overall individual visitor count rarely reaches over 200. Recently, I set up a Substack with the hope that it might help drive more readers toward my writing.

To be completely honest, I’m feeling unmotivated and burnt out. It makes me ask tough questions like is my blog still worth pursuing, should I cut my losses and move on?

To add another layer to this, I don't tolerate screen time very well, which makes social media management difficult for me. Beyond the physical fatigue of screens, if I’m being honest— and maybe this is a bit of ego —I don't enjoy self-promotion. I’ve always hoped to build a community naturally around my writing. But lately, I’m starting to wonder if the internet just doesn't work that way anymore without constant self-marketing.

If you’ve been blogging for a while i'd love to hear your thoughts on my dilemma. How do you handle burnout when growth is slow? Is organic community building still possible without socil media.

I run a blog about vintage watch restoration, and it's a niche topic. But I know there's an audience out there.

I've been writing consistently for over a year. Detailed guide, some repair tutorials, reviews of old movements. The content is good. I'm proud of it.

But the traffic is pathetic. Maybe 50 visitors a day. My affiliate links barely get clicks. I've made maybe $40 in total.

I know the problem is backlinks. Nobody is linking to my site. So Google doesn't trust me. I'm buried on page 10 of search results.

I subscribed to a newsletter from a backlink service where you can purchase Marketing 1on1 backlinks packages and the prices aren’t that bad..

Will buying links actually help? Or will Google penalize me and make things worse?

Has anyone in a niche space bought backlinks?

I have no idea if I should keep going but my motivation is gone. I started a recipe blog 3 years in hopes of gaining financial freedom but it has not happened. I’ve learned a little about the backend, but not enough to have good technical SEO. I’ve made almost 100 recipe posts which I have stressfully put together while making dinner usually while there is mayhem falling apart around me. But I had a true hope that I would *get there* and have some income of my own. I don’t want to give up that hope. I have been financially supported by a partner for 6 years and not worked, but it can’t go on this way where I’m giving up my independence. I NEED some income if only for my self worth. I don’t want to give up what I do during the day but I am VERY busy and hardly have a moment for the blog. I can maybe get one day a week to work on it. The first year was slow. The second year I went from Adsense (cents) to mediavine’s journey (nothing special) and only got to just about 10K sessions a month (=$100/month). Then mid year things tanked fast. I’m now only around 2k sessions a month, 7k+ drop. I think that’s when ai really took over google. For whatever reason, my upward trend turned completely downward. I could do what I did before and post a bit more but is it even worth my time? I have only posted like once a month for many months. I can’t seem to bust out more than that. I am making virtually nothing at this point. It’s still my best hope of a career I can really have for myself not some office job where I make less than 50k a year. That’s about all I qualify for with only a liberal arts BA and not much experience in anything. I wanted this to work more than I can say and I am devastated to throw in the towel but every time I log into Wordpress I wonder what’s the point and am I just wasting my time..

edit: adding link for more detail on opinions here: cookandcrumbs.com

Things are slow, but life is getting better. Mainly the legal shit being gone is nice. Once I get a job I think my homelessness will be gone too. I'm sober now and school starts in 2 months. But despite this I still feel like The Break Away Experience is basically all I got. That can't be healthy right? Maybe its not the blog but the choice to break away in itself, but still, the blog means a lot to me. To the point where when I feel like sayin fuck it and breaking bad I remember my blog and fly straight solely to maintain the integrity of the blog. Does anyone else feel like this?

I started blogging in 2023 with the sole purpose of seeing if could make extra income. I’d be happy with $3k….i went the fastest route: Listicles, round ups, volume. I didn’t know what the eff I was doing but just kept going but knew that my main focus was driving traffic via Pinterest.

Fast forward to 2024 and a major Pinterest update killed traffic so I decided to start from scratch with a new domain and new Pinterest account in 2025. Gained momentum, figured out how to do better keyword research. All that fun stuff and I’m still learning!

By end of 2025 I was monetized with ads and have made around $500-$700 a month so far.

Here’s where I need advice: I think I’m looking too much at what other creators are doing and feeling bleak about all these round up listicle creators regurgitating the same shit packaged differently. And after two weird Pinterest suppressions, sole reliance on Pinterest as a traffic driver is dumb but figuring out (and fleshing out) how to drive sales or whatever it is you’re supposed to do with an email list/ google/ fb etc just feels like another undertaking that I don’t really want to contemplate yet if I can’t get better traffic with Pinterest first.

Should I just keep going and see how far I can take this or throw in the towel, decrease content creation? Sell?

I’ve already put in three years but technically the clock started again in 2025. …

Thank you for reading. Any insight is appreciated

I went down a rabbit hole with my blog this week, and it's something most bloggers haven't caught onto yet.

People don't only Google anymore. They ask ChatGPT and other AI their questions, and those tools answer by pulling from real blogs and naming a few of them.

Nobody tells you the catch: your blog has to be set up a certain way for the AI to read it and mention you at all. Most blogs aren't, so they never get pulled in, no matter how good the writing is.

I finally sat down and got mine set up for it. I thought I already had it handled, and it turned out I was missing two steps that made all the difference. Not writing more posts, just making what I already have findable by AI.

I've been taking notes on the details as I go, and my August post is going to take you behind the scenes of a blog that actually gets found.

Have you ever checked whether AI even knows your blog is there?

Started a niche blog in January, consistent 1-2 posts/week, decent SEO and research behind each one. Traffic's still basically nothing.

Heard most blogs don't click until month 8-12, but hard not to feel discouraged posting into a void.

Not quitting, just wondering if this timeline is normal or if I'm missing something. Anyone else's early months look like this before it turned?

I over-estimated myself and thought I could handle both a paleo diet blog and a carnivore diet blog. But no. Instead, I just neglected it, which is a pity.

It's AdSense approved and I'm making a little money with it. Still not enough for a payout, though.

I also have a Pinterest account dedicated for only this blog but yeah... There too I failed to keep up with the pinning.

The domain (it's .org not .com) expires in 7 days, so Flippa is out of the question.

Is there a Reddit group dedicated for selling blogs? I saw some for sale here...

If it's not the right place, where do you go to sell a blog when Flippa is out of the question?

Update: Thank you for all your comments and suggestions.

I ended up being inspired by two of them so I decided this afternoon to keep my blog and give it another go.

Yes, I wish I'd known earlier, but I didn't. I only figured it out after reading the comments this afternoon.

And yet, I still want to go ahead because it’s a project I genuinely care about. It focuses on a fairly niche topic, vegan and gluten-free recipes, which I’m also actively studying. Writing allows me to explore the subject more deeply, keep learning, and stay consistent with that process.
At the same time, I do want to monetize it, or at the very least, avoid running it at a loss.
I already have experience with blogging, I’m fairly confident with SEO, and I know from experience that this is certainly not the first time everyone has declared that “SEO is dead.” However, it is the first time Google has faced such a radical shift, with AI, agents, and changing user behaviour transforming the way people search for and consume information.
I publish only content written by me, using materials and images I create myself. I try to combine genuine personal experience with carefully chosen long-tail keywords. In other words, I follow best practices and stay away from AI-generated content, using AI only to make some of the organisational parts of my workflow lighter and more manageable.
I launched my other blog three years ago, and after about a year and a half it had reached around 1,100 sessions per day. It is now down to roughly 300.😩
That change has honestly frightened me. I can assure you that I continued publishing high-quality content, updating older material, and adapting to every new change, and yet I still feel as though I have been hit by almost every negative side of the latest developments.
I’m not giving up, but I won’t pretend the question is not constantly there in the back of my mind:
Am I wasting my time?
What are your thoughts? Your experiences? Any perspective would genuinely help me right now.🥹

TL;DR: I've run a food blog for ~7 years (7K monthly uniques, down from double that). I'm a certified nutrition coach, but 1:1 and group coaching haven't worked for me. I could make $100K at a regular job, but I'm stubbornly entrepreneurial. I keep experimenting with apps, memberships, and other monetization ideas while traffic slowly erodes to AI. Worth continuing, or should I let it go?

I've been on and off, predominantly focused on my blog, CleanCookingCaitlin.com, for about seven years. I currently get around 7,000 unique users per month (with bots filtered out), though I used to get double that a couple of years ago. The blog is a passion of mine, which makes it really hard to let go. But if I were to seek employment right now, I could easily make $100K a year. However, I'm painfully entrepreneurial and can't seem to do anything without turning it into an entrepreneurial venture, lol.

I know I'm going to continue losing traffic to AI, but I hope that one day people will get sick of all the AI-only content out there and come back to something human. Who knows — that's only speculation. Anyway, I feel like it's still worth my time to keep experimenting and see what people might actually want to buy on my website. I'm a product designer, so I've been developing a prototype for a last-minute "family chaos" meal planning app. I've also tested interest in mocktail formulation, affiliates and ads (of course), and a $5/month membership that removes ads from the site and includes a meal-planning newsletter.

I'm also a certified nutrition coach, but I don't particularly enjoy one-on-one coaching (over the phone, at least), and my group programs have tanked in the past — people really need their hands held.

In reality, I think people just land on my site to grab a recipe, maybe order the ingredients, and then leave — which earns me a really small commission. Does anyone have any ideas, or am I wasting my time completely?

I've been a little obsessed with Claude Code lately, having it improve the technical and UX aspects of the site, as well as help me write content — though nothing gets posted without my sign-off and, ideally, some personal experience woven in. I'm also about to host blog posts written by medical professionals to differentiate a little more and build authority.

So, am I completely wasting my time? Or is it worth continuing to experiment with product ideas on the site (whether full-time or part-time)?

Disclaimer: Grammar corrected by AI — I'm an old lady who relies on predictive text. 😄

Im trying to wrap my head around online business. I’m trying to wrap my head around.. what are valuable opportunities?

Im suffering from shiny object syndrome. I have a blog but writing into nothingness. It is hard to determine whether this will pay off and if AI threatens this opportunity.

mostly writing into the void, a handful of regulars, traffic that barely moves. but writing weekly made me a genuinely better writer, the few comments I get are real, and a post from month 2 finally started ranking in month 10 — SEO is a long game.

stopped chasing trending topics, just write what I want now.

anyone else in year one feeling like they're shouting into the void? What's kept you going?

Long time lurker, first time poster (I think). I have a blog. No monetization, no email campaigns, just a digital journal and scrapbook of sorts but niche and has a central theme. As I’ve started sharing my writing, I’ve started to get a lot of, “is this AI?” which really bothers me. I hit a tipping point and decided to add a page and brief essay that I’ve titled “How I Write” where I essentially address the question.

Posting here out of curiosity, has anyone else run into this? Are you equally as offended (not that it matters what anyone thinks but still recognizing the emotion underneath), and what’s your hot take on having a published “editorial standards” for your own work?