The Truth About Blogging

I’ll begin with the end here: traditional blogging is dying. (I’m pretty sure it’s already dead, TBH.)

Despite blogging gurus desperately trying to convince you otherwise with their talk of AEO and GEO, there is absolutely no future in ads-monetized blogging.

And be honest, deep down you’ve known (or at least suspected) that for a while. But maybe you don’t know why.

This post will help those who are still wondering what’s gone so wrong so quickly for bloggers over the last two years.

Here you’ll learn five truths about blogging. You’ll learn why bloggers were never in the blogging business. You’ll learn the real purpose behind Google’s HCU. And why recovering from the HCU was never possible. And you’ll learn what you must do to adapt to a post-blogging world.

I know this is long but bloggers, especially new ones or those trying to regain their footing after the HCU, need to hear these things. And, frankly, few in the blogging world will tell you all this. So grab a beverage and a snack and settle in for some #truth.

Disclaimer: information on this website is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as professional business, financial or legal advice.

Truth #1: You Are Not In the Blogging Business

Whether you’ve blogged for 5 months or 15 years, whether you’ve earned pennies or thousands, you are not in the blogging business. Because the blogging business doesn’t exist. It never has.

Confused? Keep reading. It’ll all make sense.

Generally speaking, in business, the more you do and sell of something, the more money you make.

This is the basic law, or basic equation, of business.

The more pizzas you bake and sell, the more money you make.

The more lawns you mow, the more money you make.

The more piano lessons you teach, the more money you make.

The more blog posts you publish… oh, wait.

There’s a problem here, right? Because we know from our own experience that publishing more posts doesn’t lead to more money a lot of the time. We know that a lot of the time, there’s no relationship between the quantity (or quality) of our blog posts and the amount of money we make.

Buy why is that? We’ve been told to monetize our content and when we say we’re not making enough money, the blogging gurus usually tell us to produce more content.

They say you need at least 100 posts to make real money. Or that you should publish clusters of posts on the same topic and interlink them.

They sell us on all kinds of tools and courses and templates that are supposed to help us produce better content faster.

Whatever the problem is, the answer is almost always more content. And more courses, tools and other blogging products.

So bloggers are on the content treadmill, constantly publishing blog posts, Instagram reels and Pinterest pins, all in the hopes of making more money.

But for a lot of bloggers, no matter what they do, more content doesn’t lead to more money. According to the basic law of business it should, but it doesn’t.

What does that tell us?

That people who blog successfully, those who make real money blogging, aren’t actually monetizing their content.

“People who blog successfully, those who make real money blogging, aren’t actually monetizing their content.”

So how are they making money, then?

Now, you may think I’m talking about bloggers who sell courses and other products here, but I’m not. Plenty of bloggers do make money that way, but here I’m talking about people whose blogs make money just from ad revenue and affiliate sales.

If, as we just established, those people aren’t really monetizing their content, then how are they earning money?

You’ve probably already guessed: they’re making money from traffic. The more traffic they get, the more money they earn. That’s the basic law, or basic equation, of traditional blogging.

So, successful bloggers aren’t really in the blogging business. They’re not in the content creation business. They’re in the traffic business.

Specifically, they’re in the monetizing web traffic business. The more traffic they get, the more money they make.

So the basic law of blogging follows the basic law of business. Kind of.

Remember, the basic law of business is the more output you produce the more money you make.

But traffic isn’t an output, its an input.

Bloggers publish their content on the internet, which (hopefully) sends them money-making traffic. But bloggers don’t create the traffic, the traffic comes from somewhere else.

So, blogging breaks the basic law of business because it disconnects the output (content) from the result (income). Blogging introduces a third variable (traffic) into the equation, a variable that bloggers have no control over.

When traffic declines, bloggers try to solve the problem by improving their content and producing more of it. This is a natural reaction because their content is the only thing they have full control over.

But doubling down on content won’t work because bloggers aren’t in the content business. They’re in the web traffic monetization business. They can’t just create more traffic. They’re entirely dependent on third-party platforms to send it to them.

And, unfortunately, there’s no company that’s in the sending web traffic business. And there never has been. Not even Google.

“There’s no company in the sending web traffic business. And there never has been. Not even Google.”

Truth #2: Google is Not in the Search Traffic Business (and Never Was)

To recap, there’s no predictable relationship between the quality and quantity of blog content and income. Instead, bloggers make money monetizing web traffic. Web traffic that, until a few years ago, primarily came from Google.

And Google still dominates internet search. According to StatCounter, as of May 2025, nearly 90% of internet searches worldwide happen on Google. There are 8.5 billion searches on Google each day. So naturally, bloggers (and plenty of other people) think Google is in the search business.

I know it may seem like we’re getting in the weeds here, but this is important, especially if, like me, you lost a blog to Google’s Helpful Content Update. To understand the HCU, and why your traffic graph looks like mine (below), you have to understand Google’s ad business and the role of Search within it.

Google isn’t in the search business. Or even the web traffic business. Google is in the ads business. Over 75% of Google’s annual revenue comes from ads.

Google is the internet’s biggest ad exchange. Very basically, it works like this.

Companies want to advertise on websites, but negotiating with each individual website to place ads isn’t practical.

So instead, they go through another company called an ad exchange. For example, Google. The ad exchange acts as a middleman between the companies wanting to advertise and the companies that actually place ads on websites, ad networks like MediaVine and Raptive.

But these companies aren’t really paying for ads, they’re paying for eyeballs. An advertisement no one sees isn’t worth anything. Google has to have a way to guarantee advertisers that lots of people will see their ads.

So Google directs people to websites with ads via its search engine. That’s the relationship between Google’s ad business and Google Search. Google uses Search to send billions of people to websites everyday. This is how Google guarantees companies that consumers will see their ads.

This revenue model has been critical to Google’s success. In 2023 almost 74% of Google’s ad revenue was earned through Search. By comparison, only 13% was earned through YouTube. So, Google makes most of its money from ads and most of that money is made from Search.

Search is a critical piece of Google’s revenue model, but don’t get confused: Google is not in the search or the search traffic business. Search is just a means to an end for Google. Search is there to support Google’s ad business, to guarantee large audiences for Google’s advertisers.

So at this point we’ve established that:
1) bloggers aren’t really in the blogging business, they’re in the web traffic monetization business.
2) Google isn’t really in the sending web traffic business, it’s in the ads business.

The relationship between blogging and Google and web traffic worked (for some people, anyway) as long as Google kept sending traffic to websites. Then one day in September 2023, Google stopped sending traffic to many websites.

Truth #3: Web Traffic is Dying (Rapidly)

You all know about Google’s September 2023 Helpful Content Update (HCU) that crushed many blogs and websites.

The traffic graph I showed earlier was from my small hobby site in the food and wellness niche that got hit hard by the HCU. I know lots of you probably have traffic graphs that look like that. But the HCU didn’t come out of nowhere, even if it felt that way to a lot of bloggers.

To understand why the HCU happened, we need to look at what was going on in the digital world in 2022 and 2023.

It wasn’t that long ago, so you probably remember when ChatGPT was launched in late 2022.

It really was revolutionary. Sure, techies in Silicon Valley knew about and understood AI and its possibilities, but ChatGPT was the general public’s first introduction to and experience with AI. And ChatGPT took the world by storm. It got 100 million active users in just two months.

People flocked to ChatGPT and started asking it all sorts of questions. The kinds of questions they normally would’ve typed into the Google search bar. This naturally set off alarm bells at Google.

At first ChatGPT was free and it still has a free plan. But pretty quickly, by February 2023, Chat GPT started offering paid subscriptions with premium features. And that was a very important turn of events.

Remember, Google makes most of its revenue from selling ads. Google uses its free search engine to funnel billions of people to those ads by sending them to websites all over the internet.

But now ChatGPT has given people the ability to search without having to go to websites at all. It will generate an answer to their question right there on the screen, no clicking required. And ChatGPT charges for this service, meaning it doesn’t need to rely on ads to make money.

And so, this moment right here is THE CRITICAL MOMENT.

Because Google had never really faced competition for the search model before. Sure, there were other search engines, like Bing and Yahoo, but they used the exact same search model as Google: let people use their search engine for free and direct them to websites with ads.

But now ChatGPT has introduced an entirely new model of search.

A “searchless search” that doesn’t require people to visit websites.

A “searchless search” that doesn’t rely on a complex system of negotiations between companies, ad exchanges and ad networks.

A “searchless search” based on an idea that legacy search engines had always rejected: the idea that people will actually pay for search.

And so, it was at this moment that things in the search world started to get real hot.

A Short History of Google Search

Now, let’s take a step back for a moment and consider why Google searches are free.

Google was founded in 1998, the early days of the internet. And there weren’t a lot of people using the internet in 1998.

However, there were a lot of people who didn’t see much use for the internet. People who didn’t see its possibilities or understand how it could matter to their lives.

If Google had made people pay to search the internet, the internet never would’ve grown. Because people weren’t convinced they wanted or needed the internet, so they certainly weren’t going to pay to search it. And Google knew that.

So, Google based its revenue model on print media, on newspapers and magazines, which were a dominant source of information even in the late-1990s.

Newspapers and magazines don’t make most of their money from subscriptions, they make their money from selling space to advertisers.

Print media pioneered the ad-based revenue model and had made money that way for over a century.

So that’s the model of search that Google adopted back in 1998: give people the ability to search the internet for free in exchange for seeing ads on the websites they visit.

And that model work great. The internet, and Google, grew exponentially. The model worked so well that other search engines copied it. But there’s no question that Google was the best at it for almost 25 years. Then ChatGPT came along with its new model of paid, searchless search.

So, in March 2023, just four months after the release of ChatGPT, Google released Bard, it’s AI-alternative to ChatGPT. And…it did not go well. Google got a lot of bad press when the live demo of Bard gave clearly incorrect answers to some questions. Awkward!

Now, it might seem that Google quickly created Bard in response to ChatGPT, but Google had already been working on AI for years, efforts detailed on Google’s AI-dedicated website.

So, Google knew about AI and the possibility of searchless search for a long time. The launch and quick popularity of ChatGPT may have forced Google to introduce Bard before it was truly ready, but Google knew that searchless search was coming. In fact, Google had been experimenting with searchless search for several years already.

If you’ve been blogging a while, you may recall that from 2020 to 2023 it seemed like Google was making major changes to the layout of the search results page (the SERP) every few months. Back around 2020 and 2021, the most popular concept in search optimization was the snippet. SEO gurus were telling all of us to optimize for the snippet, place zero in the SERPs it was called.

These snippets appeared at the top of the search results page and were all formatted as a 2-3 sentence paragraph that would answer the user’s query.

But then bloggers began to notice something: clickthrough rates, the number of people clicking from the SERP to websites, started to decline. Turns out when people could get a short, clear answer to their question right on the search page, a lot of them didn’t want or need to go to a website and read a long post.

The success of snippets presented a real problem for Google. If snippets made people stop visiting websites, why would advertisers keep giving Google money to put ads on those sites?

In retrospect, it’s easy to see that snippets were one of Google’s first experiments in searchless search. Google needed to know if the concept of searchless search would even work. If people would really be satisfied getting answers to their query right on the search results page.

And, given how much clickthrough rates declined, Google found that, yes, there was demand for searchless search. So, we can see now that snippets were Google’s proof of concept, as they say in business. A small experiment to test the viability of a larger idea.

Despite everything that’s happened since the launch of ChatGPT, the Google search page is still the most valuable real estate on the internet. Google.com is the most visited webpage on the internet by far. In October 2025, Google got over 105 billion visits, more than YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and ChatGPT combined.

If Google can successfully adapt to searchless search it may continue to hold its place as the most visited URL on the web. But if Google is no longer sending traffic to websites, what happens to those sites?

Truth #4: Blogging is Also Dying (Rapidly)

Let’s do a quick recap of what we’ve covered so far.

• First, we determined that the blogging industry is really the web traffic monetization industry. Bloggers don’t monetize their content, they monetize their traffic.
• Second, we discussed how Google really makes money. Google makes money from selling ads, not from sending traffic around the internet.
• Third, we went over the concept of searchless search, also known as zero click search. Searchless search is the future and platforms like Google will no longer be sending massive amounts of traffic around the web.

Before we go an further, I want you to know that I’m not the only one saying this. I’m not fear-mongering here. The demise of online traffic has been reported in many different publications.

Regardless of what you might hear in blogging groups and from SEO gurus, web traffic is absolutely dying. And fast. But what does this mean for websites that rely on traffic-based monetization? Well, we know what it means because we’ve seen this kind of thing happen before.

Remember, when Google started back in 1998, it took its revenue model from the print media world. And eventually, it didn’t just take the print media’s revenue model. Google started taking its revenue, too.

As the internet grew, more and more advertisers moved their ads online. It became harder for print magazines and newspapers to get companies to buy ad space in their publications. Paper media just wasn’t how people got their information anymore.

So, subscriptions to newspapers and magazines dropped. Unable to promise advertisers that large numbers of people would see their ads, companies started placing fewer and fewer ads and started paying less for them.

This sent many newspapers and magazines into a death spiral. Between 2002 and 2020, more than 40,000 newspaper and magazine publishers in the United States went out of business, a 46% decline in the total number of publishers.

And this is what would happen to blogs and websites with searchless search. When they lose traffic, they are worth less to advertisers. So, the entire web traffic monetization industry starts a long, downward spiral.

At least, that’s what would’ve happened, if Google hadn’t just ripped off the Band-aid with the 2023 Helpful Content Update.

The Real Reason for the HCU

The September 2023 Helpful Content Update was the equivalent of a magnitude 7 earthquake in the web traffic monetization industry. For two chaotic weeks, Google ran the HCU and bloggers saw their traffic crater.

By the time the update ended and the dust settled, many blogs had lost 60% or more of their traffic. That’s what happened to my small blog in the food and wellness niche.

Now, some volatility and traffic loss was normal after each update. SEO and blogging gurus told us to be patient. That things would even out eventually and we’d probably get our traffic back.

But many bloggers continued to lose traffic throughout October and November. It soon became apparent that something serious had changed and that the HCU wasn’t a typical algorithm update.

Nonetheless, there were plenty of people trying to sell us solutions to “recover from the HCU.”

But I knew early on that the HCU was the end of my little blog. Remember, I’m not a blog coach or an SEO guru. I’m a small business and tax adviser. I study business. And looking at my traffic graph I knew my blog was dead. Forever.

No matter what you’re selling, this is not the kind of graph any business can recover from. I didn’t care what the so-called experts in the blogging world said, I knew it was over for my blog and many others by the end of 2023.

And it was pretty clear the HCU’s targeting of smaller websites and blogs like mine was intentional, not the result of some weird algorithm glitch.

But this had never happened before. Past updates had targeted specific kinds of content, like posts stuffed full of keywords and spammy links. But Google had never targeted specific types of sites instead of specific types of content before. I was curious about what was really going on.

So, I analyzed my site. Though my site was small, about a third of my posts had ranked in the top three on the Google results page for the targeted keywords.

After the HCU, these posts were usually at the bottom of the top 10. The top posts were now big sites like WebMD, even if the WebMD post was less relevant to the user’s query. I also lost traffic to Business Insider, even though my blog’s topic was not at all business related.

And this was common. In the stories and comments I read from other bloggers, they mentioned over and over losing rankings and traffic to big sites like Forbes, AllRecipes, Reddit, Pinterest and TripAdvisor.

Many in the blogging world have interpreted the HCU as censoring small blogs by demoting them in search rankings. But I don’t think that’s the case for two reasons.

“Many in the blogging world have interpreted the HCU as censoring small blogs by demoting them in search rankings. But I don’t think that’s the case for two reasons.”

First, Google always had the power and ability to privilege large sites in the search results.

If Google wanted to program the search algorithm to put big sites at the top of the SERPs, it easily could have anytime. The idea that Google, after 25 year in business, just decided one day to completely upend the algorithm didn’t make much sense.

Second, all the sites that took over the SERPs after the HCU have something in common, something that most small blogs don’t have. Yes, they’re large well-known sites with a lot of domain and topical authority, but they have something else in common, too.

All these big sites have a login portal. Now why does that matter? Because it means these sites have their own traffic source: their subscribers.

These are the kind of sites that people go to directly. Most people who visit Reddit or Pinterest or the New York Times aren’t searching Google first to get there. They either type the URL directly into their browser or click on a bookmark or stored link.

By promoting the kind of sites that people visit without going through Google search first, Google was sending a clear message: that Google is not going to facilitate web traffic anymore.

Because ChatGPT fundamentally changed the search landscape to one of searchless search. So sending lots of traffic from random people to different sites around the internet was no longer a viable business model for Google.

Remember, Google relies on ads for its revenue. If Google itself is no longer sending traffic to sites, it will privilege sites that draw their own audience and generate their own traffic instead. Because Google still needs to guarantee advertisers that consumers will see the ads those companies pay for. That’s why all these subscriber-based sites ended up at the top of the SERPs post-HCU.

So, the HCU wasn’t (inherently) about Google privileging bigger sites and censoring smaller ones. It was about Google privileging sites that draw their own audience and generate their own traffic over sites that don’t.

“The HCU wasn’t about Google privileging bigger sites and censoring smaller ones. It was about Google privileging sites that draw their own audience and generate their own traffic over sites that don’t.”

And because these sites have profiles on each subscriber, Google can show these subscribers more targeted advertising based on their interests. And targeted audiences are much more valuable and desirable to advertisers than the random audiences smaller, non-subscriber based sites get via search traffic.

The HCU was a clear message from Google: whether your site is large or small, success in the future will depend on generating your own traffic.

And as hard as it may be to hear, bloggers need to listen to Google’s message. Because no platform is in the business of facilitating web traffic. Not Facebook or YouTube or Insta or TikTok. Not even Pinterest.

Like Google, ALL of those platforms make money from advertising. None of them make money by sending people to other websites. So trying to replace your lost Google traffic with these platforms will not work. Not over the long term, anyway.

So yes, blogging for money, at least as we’ve known it, really is dying.

I know lots of blogging coaches are telling you otherwise. They’re telling you that bloggers have recovered from algorithm updates before. Or that you can somehow replace your lost Google traffic with traffic from other platforms.

But the reality is that the traffic-based search model the entire internet has relied on for 30 years is dying. And the new searchless, zero click search model that’s replacing it will deprive websites of their primary, and in some cases only, source of revenue.

So, at this point bloggers have a choice. They can stay on the content treadmill, chasing traffic and switching tactics to keep up with algorithm and platform changes, knowing there’s no direct connection between their efforts and their income.

Or they can start down a different path, one where they’re in charge and not dependent on third-party platforms for their success.

Truth #5: There is Hope for Bloggers (If They’re Willing to Change)

The only way for bloggers to adapt to the new zero-click, searchless internet is to put themselves in control of both the inputs and outputs of their business. How do they do that? By selling their own products and services to their own audience.

Now, I know a lot of you have tried selling your own products in the past. I know because I’ve seen many bloggers post in various places about not being able to sell.

And I can tell you exactly what these bloggers did wrong.

They followed the typical advice to “diversify your income streams” by creating your own products. That product creation is just another way to monetize your blog.

And I’m going to tell you straight: that’s a lie. You cannot monetize a blog with products.

Creating and selling your own products isn’t monetizing a blog, it’s starting a business. And the reason so many bloggers fail at selling their own products is because blogging skills are not business skills.

In traditional blogging, monetizing is a passive activity. Yes, you publish content and post about it on social media, which takes time and effort.

But the actual work of getting people to your blog is done by the platforms you post on. You aren’t going out and actively recruiting readers. Instead, you’re relying on platform algorithms to do that work. Monetizing is a passive activity. It only requires you to promote your blog.

But selling requires you to market your products. Selling requires you to actively find and cultivate potential customers. Selling requires you to be intentional and purposeful, instead of leaving decision-making up to an algorithm.

And this is why you can’t monetize a blog with products. Because selling requires more than passive promotion.

You can’t just make some products, put a shop tab in your menu and insert links in your posts or emails and expect people to buy. That does not work. No matter how nicely formatted your blog post is or how pretty your Pinterest pins are, they will not sell products for you.

“No matter how nicely formatted your blog post is or how pretty your Pinterest pins are, they will not sell products for you.”

Promoting your blog and driving traffic to generate ad and affiliate income is completely different from the active marketing needed to sell your own products. Selling your own products means you’re transitioning from sessions-focused blogger to sales-focused business owner.

And blogging doesn’t set you up to make that transition very well. Because, as we’ve learned, blogging disconnects your output from your income and relies on passive promotion, not active selling. So, blogging doesn’t give you the skills you need to start and grow a business.

That is why I started the Creator Business Club, a membership specifically for bloggers who want to pivot to business ownership.

About Creator Business Club

CBC is divided into two modules: starting and scaling.

The starting module is basically a business boot camp. In this module, you’ll identify a target market, determine your MVP (minimum viable product) and develop a go-to-market plan. You’ll also learn about business finance basics, including tax issues for small business owners.

The scaling module includes information and resources you’ll need as your business grows, including information on forming LLCs and hiring freelancers or employees. This module also covers more advanced financial and tax advice, such as self-employed retirement plan options and S-corp taxation.

You can learn more about CBC here. Just be aware that CBC is not your typical membership.

• CBC isn’t open to everyone, it’s by application only.
• CBC is only open during certain times the year and each new cohort is limited to about 30 people.
• Everyone is required to sign a set of community guidelines before they start CBC program.
• And everyone undergoes a four week onboarding process once accepted into the program.

All of this is to ensure we have a respectful, supportive and collaborative group dynamic. If working with like-minded bloggers in that kind of environment appeals to you, be sure to check out the FAQ page.