Blogging In 2024

Over the past years couple of years blog traffic has been tanking, for some time I thought it might have just been me, but then i heard it from Dave Rupert on Shop Talk show, and it made sense. LLMs and AI is slowly killing the internet as we know it.

My metrics

I dug into my emails from the google search console team and found two results nearly one year apart. Impressions are only 60% of its value a year ago while clicks are only 35% of where they were a year ago. I'm getting less impressions and even less clicks.

May 2023

June 2024

Suspicions

What I think is happening is a large portion of users are getting their answers from ChatGPT, Copilot, and llms like this. A lot of my posts have been filling gaps in the internet, notes for myself when I struggle to integrate x in y because there was a gap of how to do so in the docs and stack overflow. Some small fraction of users have moved on to duck duck go and other non global warming search engines with AI in their results.

Clicks are down even further, than impressions. I can't tell for sure but my gut feeling is that people are using the AI generated results. I know I use them quite often, but listening to Justin and Autumn at the end of the latest ship it podcast https://changelog.com/shipit/115, they both claim that they get no benefits from it and don't know anyone who does. In fact Justin has taken the most ethical approach to move to duck duck go since it doesn't kill the earth with each search by injecting AI results. Personally I do find it quite helpful, sometimes the answer is there, or an idea that triggers me to think of the idea.

Ok blogging is dead why keep going

Just as always blogging has been for me. It's a great place to write down your thoughts for later reference, and to help cement them into your brain. Beyond getting famous and clicks blogging is useful to you first and foremost, that should be the number one reason.

How do we keep the internet of old

RSS feed readers is a great way to keep creators that you like and want to support in your feed regardless of what the higher powers of search and social media think of them. This year I built my own reader , and I use it every single day to read articles out of my own custom curated feed.

I have also created thoughts to help share and lift up creators that make good posts. I have a crome extension that allows me to create a blog post tied to a link right within chrome. I use this several times per day to save some pages for later with a small note.