The Impact of AI on Blogs

Is blogging on its last legs?

I haven’t been posting as much this year, so I expected to see overall blog post hits go down as the months passed. But I started noticing a trend where older posts that had been consistent in views started trending down as well. I’m not losing sleep over it, but I became curious if the drop in traffic had more to do with AI summaries taking over search results like Google and Bing.

For example, let’s say I want to find how to retrieve SQL view definitions. If I search Google, I get the following result:

While my blog post is referenced to the right, many people will look to the AI overview first and use that to find their answer.

Beyond blogs, major websites are noticing the trend. Take this article, for instance, reporting that Business Insider laid off 21% of its workforce due to traffic drops. Other companies, HuffPost and the Washington Post, have also lost about half of their traffic over the past three years.

AI overviews can be helpful in a pinch, but they’re more like seeing a cheap cover band instead of the original artist. You get the greatest hits but not the deep cuts. Songs may not sound quite right, with the cover band playing wrong notes or singing wrong lyrics. If everyone started seeing the cover bands, the original artists would be left playing to an empty arena or stadium. Worst of all, we’d stop getting new music because why write new songs if no one’s listening?

Original artists may get credit, but it’s not the same. If a blogger is growing their blog, they want someone to see their blog post, click another post, another page, and go back through old posts. The concept of engagement and discovery with a blog isn’t there if all the user sees is a link on an AI overview.

To be clear, I’m not against AI. I integrate it into my professional and personal life daily. With that said, we need to be cognizant of where the information is coming from and when to dig deeper. Take the time to check the sources for those AI overviews.

Thanks for reading!