How Google and AI are Killing Travel Blogs Like Mine
I'm not going to sugarcoat it: it's been an awful last year for small digital publishers like me. I've spent the last 15 years building this travel blog into a trusted source of information, and in less than 12 months it has gone from a really successful business I was confident in to a ticking time bomb that I'm scared of.
And it all comes down to Big Bad Google and the rise of AI.
If you also work within digital publishing, you're probably feeling this, too. I haven't heard of many small, independent website owners who haven't felt the effects of this in the last year or so. But I realized recently that the average reader of my site or follower on social media has no idea what has been happening to us behind the scenes.
So I'm here to show you.
Let me be clear: I still LOVE what I do here. The blood, sweat, tears, and tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars I have poured into this site over the years have been worth it, and I'm so, so proud of what I've built. There are more than 800 posts on this blog, covering 50+ countries on 6 continents around the world. I've won awards, spoken at conferences, and been interviewed as an expert on both travel and travel blogging. But the last year has been anything but encouraging.
In the last year (2024), I have lost roughly 40% of the traffic on this site alone. My ad income (which is the main way I earn money) is down 34% year over year (though a couple months ago, it was down 42% year over year). And I'm actually considered to be one of the lucky ones, as many of my fellow bloggers have lost nearly everything in the last 12 months.
So what the hell happened? It's a mixture of AI becoming more ubiquitous and “learning” (read: stealing) from sites like mine, and Google making changes to its algorithms that actively hurt small publishers in order to boost its own earnings.
I'm not gonna get super technical with this, but I do want to give you a little insight on how this has all happened so quickly.
Table of contents
How AI has evolved
AI, or Artificial Intelligence, as it relates to the internet is not new; AI has been around for decades, streamlining processes, building algorithms, and automating all manner of tasks. (Here's a good historic AI timeline.) But things accelerated in the 21st century, when we began to get things like IBM's Watson and Apple's Siri, which were AI tools designed not just to help humans, but to mimic them.
In the last handful of years, AI has evolved rapidly into the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) era, with consumer-facing tools emerging that can not only automate tasks, but also generate their own content.
The advent of “large language model” tools like all the GPTs are what is currently driving the AI Renaissance. The ChatGPTs of the world that can write essays, carry on conversations, and even generate images sound cool on the surface. But underneath, they are what may ultimately be the downfall of industries like mine.
How does AI learn?
First things first: all AI tools currently on the market (and any future ones that will be released) are machine learning tools. No matter how life-like an AI chat bot or assistant may seem, they are not real, and do not possess human emotions, morals, or reasoning. Meaning someone has to “teach” them everything they know.
The big question (and an ongoing legal question) is in regards to that “teaching.”
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, it made AI technology available to the masses. Anyone could now use AI to ask a question, write an essay, brainstorm ideas, or even plan a trip. But the output that ChatGPT and similar AI tools give has to come from somewhere.
Every iteration of OpenAI's GPT (which actually dates back to 2018) has been trained on a variety of sources or parameters. The first version of ChatGPT was trained on “570 GB of data sourced from books, Wikipedia, research articles, webtexts, websites and other forms of content and writing on the net. Approximately 300 billion words were fed into the system.”
In March 2025, it came out in court documents that Meta partially trained its own AI using content from Library Genesis (LibGen), an online “shadow library” of pirated books, journal articles, research papers, etc. – meaning it knowingly used copyrighted content it didn't have the rights to use.
Other companies have admitted to training their AI tools on everything from Reddit threads to YouTube videos – all content created by actual humans who never gave any of these generative AI models permission to basically scrape their content. There are many ongoing court cases against the likes of OpenAI, Meta, Perplexity AI, and others surrounding this unauthorized and uncompensated use of intellectual property.
And the AI companies have admitted that they've done (and still do) this, but use the excuse that “it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.” (source)
How AI is affecting me
You won't likely find me filing a lawsuit against Microsoft or Meta anytime soon, because I'm small potatoes in the grand field that is the internet. But generative AI is now everywhere, and it's affecting me – and probably you – every day.
Not a day goes by without Gmail prompting me to let its Gemini AI write an email for me, or Facebook's Meta AI providing me with irrelevant links beneath photos, or emails from companies offering to “create” me an AI best friend (yes, that's real). Meta even tried to launch “AI users” recently, though it so far hasn't gone very well.
Within the travel industry alone, we're also now seeing everything from AI chat bots offering to plan trip itineraries to actual AI travel influencers (insert the largest eyeroll possible here). All of these will take not only work but also authority away from actual human travel content creators who spend money and time actually traveling to places in order to give tips about them.
An AI chat bot has no real concept of time or distance, and certainly has no first-hand experience with travel. All it takes is a person to have one bad experience with an AI-planned trip, and they'll start mistrusting all the travel content they see online.
The cost of AI
I also want to briefly touch on the true cost of AI tools like ChatGPT – and I'm not talking about the direct cost to your pocketbook, since most of these AI tools are free for the average person to use. I'm talking about the staggering environmental cost that nobody seems to be talking about. (Then again, maybe you just don't know!)
In order for AI to do what it does, it requires absolutely MASSIVE amounts of energy to power giant data centers. Data centers owned by the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Meta are not new; but they are growing exponentially with the rise of AI technology.
And with an increased demand for energy (in this case, electricity to run all those super computers) comes an increased demand for ways to generate that electricity. Even though Google has made some big promises to reduce its carbon footprint, the increase in fossil fuel usage to power data centers has meant that, in the last 5 years, Google's greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 48% – 13% in 2023 alone.
It's estimated that some of these data centers will soon be using more electricity than entire cities to power the ChatGPTs and Geminis and DALL-Es of the world. Google and other tech giants are even looking toward nuclear power to meet the energy-guzzling needs of AI.
And energy isn't the only thing that AI is guzzling. The power required to run all those servers produces an immense amount heat as a byproduct. And in order to cool the systems down, many data centers use copious amounts of water; more water than anyone initially thought, in fact.
A 2024 study found that that asking ChatGPT to write you one short email consumes the equivalent of a 16 oz bottle of water – and that doesn't take into account the amount of water used to *train* the AI to be able to answer that email.
Some data centers used a closed-loop cooling system where the water can be re-used multiple times, but there's a finite number of times the water can be recycled, and some of it is always lost to evaporation. And this is all in a day and age when scientists are predicting that global demand for fresh water will exceed supply by 40% by 2030, and Google and Microsoft are already operating data centers in areas facing water scarcity.
It's estimated that a single ChatGPT prompt uses anywhere from 10x to 25x the amount of energy/water that a “normal” Google search would use. Just some food for thought.
Blogs, Google, and the HCU
And speaking of Google searches…
Google has been the main arbiter of information on the web for 20+ years. Its very name has become a verb to mean “to look something up on the internet” (as in, “just Google it“).
As a blogger, in order to have my content “found” on the internet, I've had to play by Google's rules. Because, like it or not, Google is the main search engine used around the world. Google processes an estimated 9.5 million searches per minute, or 14 billion searches per day, and most bloggers have – up until now, at least – relied on Google to send them a good chunk of their overall traffic.
And a site like mine earns traffic from Google through search engine optimization, or SEO. Search engine optimization is simple on the surface: basically, you try to answer queries with your content that people are searching for, and then use specific keywords in that content to signal to a search engine like Google that your content is relevant in answering that query. Google's algorithm then decides which content is actually “best” for any query, and places that content at the top of search results.
Or, at least, that's what it's supposed to do.
(For reference, in 2023, Google search drove roughly 75% of my total site traffic, accounting for more than 1.3 million sessions on this site. In 2024, Google still drove 75% of my traffic, but the number of sessions dropped to around 870,000.)
Are blogs dead to Google?
For years, blogs and other small sites appeared to have just as much chance of showing up at the top of Google search results as larger sites. If your content was good (as in, on-topic, well-written, and generally helpful), the search results would reflect that.
But something changed in the last few years.
Now look: I'm not a Google insider, and some of the things that have happened to search in the last decade may very well be coincidental, or just the natural evolution of the internet (even if I hate it). But there are several things that certainly seem connected, and that suggest that Google maybe cares less and less about humans and good search results these days and more and more about ad dollars. (Welcome to capitalism!)
Google hired Prabhakar Raghavan (the guy who was in charge of Yahoo search from 2005-2012 – you know, when it was run into the ground) to head both Google Search and Ads in 2020, and search results have seen dramatic changes since then. (This article is a fantastic if scathing look at Raghavan, who was replaced in October 2024.)
The “Helpful” Content Update of 2023
Google is constantly releasing updates to its search algorithm, with usually a couple major updates pushed out each year. These updates aim to improve search results to better meet user intent. And for years, they more or less did seem to weed out spammy sites and misinformation, and provide searchers with the information they were looking for.
I've known bloggers who got “hit” (i.e. negatively affected) by various Google algorithm updates over the years. But they were always the outliers and not the norm; generally, if you were publishing “good” content (i.e. written by you that was either helpful or at least entertaining in some way), then your site would usually fare okay in major updates. And if you did get hit in an update, there was usually a way you could improve your site and start gaining search traffic again.
But then came the “Helpful Content Update” in September 2023. This was not the first Helpful Content Update (HCU) Google had ever released, but it was the first that seemed to target smaller publishers across the web.
Google claimed this update was going to focus on “identifying signals of quality that correspond to helpful content” – which sounds like a good thing, right?
But what happened was many small websites and blogs suddenly saw their content falling down in rankings, or disappearing from search results altogether. At the same time, we saw an increase in sponsored content, thin content from huge brands/publishers, and outdated content from forums like Reddit, Quora, and TripAdvisor suddenly appearing at the top of search results.
Gaslit by Google?
Google claimed that sites negatively affected in the September 2023 HCU were perhaps not actually helpful, or were maybe trying to game the algorithm by publishing spammy, keyword-stuffed SEO content that didn't take real human intent into account. Now… were there sites out there over-optimizing for SEO? Sure! But plenty of sites who got hit were not doing anything wrong.
Google has kept insisting that they are not slapping entire sites with an “unhelpful” qualifier, but the fact is that very few sites that were hit in the September 2023 HCU have seen any significant recovery.
SEO experts, site developers, bloggers… we've all been at a loss. Every single one of my blogger friends saw less traffic in 2024 than in 2023. And, in some cases, the losses were absolutely devastating; I'm talking up to 90% traffic (and income) loss for some sites.
And the sites that were hit the worst all had one thing in common, regardless of topic or industry: they were all independent (i.e. small) websites. (It would later come out in leaked documents that Google has been adding a “smallPersonalSite” tag to identify smaller independent websites – I wonder why?)
A second blow came in March 2024, when another core update hit even more small sites. This was around the same time that Google signed a $60 million deal with Reddit that would allow Google to train its new AI tech on Reddit posts. Interestingly, this is also when Reddit posts starting showing near the top of every single Google search. (Coincidence? Maybe, but it's hard to believe it was.)
In October 2024, in what was perhaps just a fluffy PR move, Google hosted several independent bloggers hit hard by the HCU and other recent updates for a “Creator Conversation Event” at Google headquarters in California. To talk and “listen,” they claimed.
There are various reports from bloggers who attended this event (read this one or this one), and they all agreed on a few things: namely that Google was trying to deny that big brands (and Reddit) have been given priority in search results, that sites hit by the HCU likely would not recover anytime soon, and that they *didn't know* why some objectively good sites were so negatively affected.
What I extrapolated from this is that Google's own engineers might not fully understand how its algorithm works any longer, and they could not roll it back or reset it to a pre-HCU time even if they wanted to. Search has changed forever.
When Google and AI unite
And this circles us back to AI.
AI in some form has already been at work for years to help build those complicated and secret search algorithms (that may or may not be out of control now). But in the last couple years, Google has added AI to its outward offerings to consumers, too.
Not to be left in the dust of generative AI and other tech giants like Microsoft and Meta, Google introduced its own chatbot, Bard, to the world in the first half of 2023. Bard got off to a rocky start, but eventually evolved into Gemini.
But Google took its AI integration to another level in May 2024, rolling out “AI Overviews” in its search results as part of its new “Search Generative Experience (SGE).” These overviews now appear at the top of most search result pages, and summarize some of the top search results right there on the page.
The two main problems are: Google's AI cannot differentiate between accurate information and spammy misinformation (which is how for a while it was suggesting people add glue to their pizza sauce), and it's just regurgitating content it's “reading,” thereby taking traffic away from the sites it's pulling info from.
A site like mine does not make any money from someone seeing something I wrote in a Google AI Overview; I only make money (for example, from ad impressions) when someone clicks over to my site and reads the content on my page. But why would they need to click over to my page if Google is showing my content right at the top of search results?
There was plenty of uproar when AI Overviews first launched, both over the sometimes contradictory nature of answers, and the fact that it was essentially stealing content from publishers without any credit.
Google has finally started adding some citations to its AI Overviews, which is at least a step in the right direction. But click-through rates from AI results to actual website sources are dismal at best.
But those AI Overviews coupled with the other changes Google has made in the last year have led to people just not finding content on sites like mine any longer.
In early 2025, Google also launched “AI Mode” in Beta, where users can fully interact with Google a la ChatGPT, where everything is summarized by Gemini and no links or further search results are provided at all. If Google shifts over to this model for all it's searches, it will likely be the final death knell for independent websites like mine.
Yes, search results suck now
I'm sure that, for many years, you could do a Google search and find what you were looking for pretty quickly. Yes, there have always been ads in search results, but for the most part you used to be able to find a solid answer to whatever search query you typed in without scrolling too far down the page.
Now, though, when you perform a Google search, you might see a large AI Overview section (the screen real estate this section takes up is only increasing), followed by some links to (possibly outdated) online forum posts, followed by ads from few big-brand/marketing-focused websites, followed by a slew of video links, and THEN maybe some website content related to what you were searching for. Maybe.
But you might also now find yourself returning to that Google search bar to try to re-write your search query because Google isn't really showing you what you asked for.
And this is 100% by design.
Google WANTS you to spend more time within its own environment. The more times you have to run a Google search, the more opportunity Google has to show you ads/sponsored content, and push you towards their own tools. Basically, the longer you spend within the Google ecosystem, the more money Google stands to make from you.
In 2024, Google saw record profits and revenue, despite more and more people expressing wariness over the reliance on AI in search results, and Google's search market share falling below 90% for the first time in a decade.
So what can we do?
Here's the thing: I'm super passionate about this topic because it's directly affecting me and my ability to run this site as my main business. I realize that many of you have not (yet) been affected by AI in any meaningful way, other than maybe getting frustrated by crappy search results.
But I do ask that you consider the broader implications of a world that increasingly relies on AI. My job will not be the only one that AI comes after.
Here are a few things we can all do right now:
1. Be skeptical of AI
While AI and GPTs have improved by leaps and bounds over the last year, the fact is that AI technology is still just that – technology. It cannot think for itself. It often “hallucinates” or simply makes things up if it doesn't “know” (i.e. can't find) an answer. And it still can be fairly easily manipulated.
Here are just a few news stories from the last year that I saved that highlight some of the bad behavior AI can get up to:
- Air Canada Must Honor a Fake Refund Policy Created by Its Chatbot
- Lawyer cites fake cases generated by ChatGPT in legal brief
- X’s AI bot is so dumb it can’t tell the difference between a bad game and vandalism
- Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers
- A chatbot hinted a kid should kill his parents over screen time limits
And I mean, we all remember several years ago when an early Microsoft AI chatbot turned into a Nazi on Twitter within a day, right?
AI is not – and never will be – perfect, and just blindly accepting everything that an AI tool outputs as factually correct and morally sound is a mistake.
2. Don't use AI when you don't need to
Artificial intelligence can absolutely be useful. But do we really need to use ChatGPT to create fake cartoon images of our pets doing jobs, or answer emails we could write just as quickly ourselves? No. We really don't. Especially when we now have a better idea of the environmental costs of all those AI queries.
There are plenty of positive use cases of AI, but there are plenty of tasks people are using AI for that they just don't need to.
I don't WANT to see AI write novels or create movies (have you seen this? it's terrible). I want it to transcribe a podcast to make it more accessible, and let me know if I've done the math wrong on my accounting spreadsheet. I don't need AI to build me an itinerary for a city it has never visited when there are real people out there who have been to that place who can help me instead.
3. Vote in your own best interest
There really hasn't been a lot of conversation around the future reality of AI in terms of economic impact (I mean, what happens when AI replaces so many jobs that there aren't enough jobs for real humans to do?) – but I imagine there will be in the future.
And when those conversations begin, pay attention to the lawmakers who get it, and who aren't in the pockets of the mega-corporations looking to save as much money as possible by replacing humans with tech. (Then again, who am I kidding? In the US, they'll replace us all with AI in a second if it means billionaires will make more.)
4. Consider changing your default search engine
It's difficult to avoid AI these days, even in search results. But if you're especially pissed off at Google like most bloggers are these days, there ARE other alternatives out there. Google still has a monopoly on search (literally, as decided by the DOJ), but it's not the only search engine in the game.
Other alternatives that don't rely on AI (yet) include DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and Brave. And Bing is an option if you're just looking for less-manipulated search results (though Bing is owned by Microsoft, and uses AI).
5. Follow your favorite bloggers
If there are bloggers and creators you find yourself turning to or even just stumbling upon regularly, please consider doing a few things to support them:
- Bookmark their site – This one is so easy. Bookmark your favorite sites, and read them regularly if you can. Every single pageview is helpful to us; you don't have to click a single link or buy anything in order for me to earn money from the ads on my site.
- Subscribe to their newsletter – Most bloggers have a free email newsletter – me included! (You can sign up here.) An email list is one of the few things a blogger “owns” beyond their site, and is a great way to ensure you get regular updates from your favorites. (And if you already subscribe to your favorite bloggers, remember that clicking on links is an easy way to support us!) Some bloggers might also offer paid subscriptions through Patreon or Substack, too, which is a direct income stream you can support if you're able to.
- Share with a friend – Yes, sharing a blog post or Instagram post or even just the name of your favorite blogger/creator can help! Word of mouth still matters.
And if there are travel bloggers you follow regularly, maybe consider checking their site for travel info first before turning to ChatGPT or an old Reddit forum from 2015 when you're planning a trip of your own. (And if you can book a hotel or tour through a travel blogger's affiliate link, that's also super helpful, too!)
What I'm doing as a blogger
Sadly, many of my travel blogging colleagues have already thrown in the towel. Some have had to let go writers and editors; others have shifted attention to other mediums like YouTube; and still others have quit entirely and gotten other full-time jobs again.
As a small publisher trying desperately to keep my head above water, there are a few things I'm working on at the moment. These include:
- Trying to grow my traffic numbers from non-Google sources such a Pinterest, my email list (are you subscribed?), and my social media channels. It is a very, very long road to replace the amount of traffic that Google search used to send me, though, and most of my traffic will likely never come back.
- Brainstorming products and services to offer. I already sell some printable versions of my most popular itineraries, and may put together a travel-related ebook or two this year. But those are not huge money-makers.
- Considering other sites and sources of income. I have a second niche site (Cleveland Traveler) that isn't as big as this one (and that also lost traffic in a recent update), but that has a more targeted audience on social media. I got on the right PR lists last year (don't ask me how; I wish I knew), and made a sizable amount of income in 2024 from paid partnerships on Instagram and TikTok. I'd love to continue figuring out how to land more work like that.
Others I know are testing putting up paywalls on their sites, running group tours, or shifting over to being travel agents instead of travel bloggers. There are lots of options, and no one knows what the best path ahead is.
What I'm NOT contemplating yet is quitting.
I am very aware that Google may continue chipping away at my traffic until I'm no longer making enough money to do this as my full-time job. And I will mourn that like the death of a loved one if/when it happens. But we're not there yet, and I plan to continue traveling and publishing new content on this site as long as I can.
My strategy isn't changing that much, though I do think I'll focus more on a mixture of content types and topics, keeping in mind that I need to write things that have a chance of catching peoples' eye on social media since they're not likely to find most of my content in search results any longer.
I don't plan to stop blogging. But I am starting to come to terms with the reality that I might, at some point in the next couple years, need to declare defeat and turn to something else as my main source of income. Many of my friends are sadly already there.
Is there any hope?
Listen, one of my favorite movies as a kid was “Pollyanna,” and maybe it had more of an impact on my young mind than I realized, because I still find myself feeling optimistic about this site and my “job” as a travel blogger more often than I let myself feel stressed. That doesn't mean that my traffic won't be entirely wiped away tomorrow, because it could be.
But I don't see a future where the internet doesn't exist. How people access information might change, and I certainly do not condone AI bots stealing all the work I've personally done. But I do still believe there is a demand for content like mine, if only people can find it.
So if you value content created by humans for humans like what you find on this site, please consider speaking up and showing that support in whatever ways you can.
Thanks for reading. If you got this far, you deserve a cookie.
– Amanda
Amanda Williams is the award-winning blogger behind A Dangerous Business Travel Blog. She has traveled to more than 60 countries on 6 continents from her home base in Ohio, specializing in experiential and thoughtful travel through the US, Europe, and rest of the world. Amanda only shares tips based on her personal experiences and places she's actually traveled!
I read your full post and i stand with you!
My blog also hit by ai overview and other update. Hope things get normal soon
It’s pretty shocking how the tech firms have harvested all our combined human knowledge to train their AI “models”. Now they no longer need us. It makes you wonder if this was the intention with opening the internet to the public. The same goes for Amazon, they have drastically reduced commissions, now that they don’t need us as much to promote their shopping system. They have first destroyed most smaller online vendors, with our help, so now they will discard us shortly. We have all really been exploited.
July 2025, you can no longer get top rankings in Google for blog posts answering questions, cause the first big “result” is AI served and then the usual lists of 5-10 ‘other searches’. And I have seen this progress fast in the wrong direction over the last 2-3 months.
Yup, things have been looking bleak this year. BUT the only hope I’m holding onto is that, at some point, the AI (as it works right now) is just going to cannibalize itself. Can’t happen soon enough!
Maybe you should think what users really want and then rethink your content. Of course, AI will take over 10 best things to do posts. Maybe you should focus more on generating unique and inspiring content. SEO content is crap and I’m happy to see it gone. Reddit is also by far the best ressource for travel nowadays. Instead of complaining you should be more self-critical.
Have a read around my site, Franc, before you suggest that my content is crap. It’s not, and even if it was that still doesn’t make it okay for AI tools to scrape and steal it without my consent.
Agreed with Amanda here. Regardless of what content Amanda produces (good or bad, unique or not unique), AI bots will ingest it anyway, then regurgitate it to others without citing the original source. And even if AI were to cite the original source, statistics show people don’t actually click on the cited source to visit the original source content.
And if people don’t go to the original source content, then there’s basically no sales funnel, no brand building, no on-going dialogue etc…
It’s like trying to stop a fire by pouring gasoline on it and fanning it with lots of hydrogen and oxygen.
Feel the same, I had been running my blog successfully since 2017 and since Google AI came 90% traffic was stolen by AI stealing my content
This is so sad because for travel content in particular I want to know who the author is to know how to use the info they present! Like, some travel content creators are great for destination inspiration, but not all are good for actual planning advice. Like, I can get a itinerary from a big guide book which will probably hit the most popular places, but the blogger who I feel we could be friends in real life will probably have extra details or suggestions that get me a bit off the beaten path
Completely agree. As a small publisher of predominantly informational content, Google AI overview has halved my traffic. Madness. My information shows up in the overviews as well which is basically stealing.
I feel your pain, Paul! It’s a rough time to be a web publisher.
FWIW, it’s not just the travel niche. The solution, insofar as there actually is one, will indeed be to provide exactly that content AI is incapable of. Our only hope is that real humans will snap back to appreciating humanity after the novelty of how cool AI is will wear off. Not unlike how people are getting re-acquainted with socializing IRL post-COVID.
Yeah it’s definitely not just travel blogs, but that’s what I can personally speak on based on my own experience. It’s certainly affecting all industries! I hope there will be a swing back to valuing human-driven content again, and that my site will survive long enough to see it.
Wow. I had no idea and thank you for educating me on this. I will definitely be making sure I bookmark and use blogs I trust. And already changed to duck duck go! Best of luck to you.
This was a great read and resonated with me so much as a fellow small blogger! Thank you for taking the time and research into this.
I’ll be sharing and have signed up to your newsletter.
All I can do is thank you. You really put great effort into this article and every breakdown you wrote hit to the point.
Fantastic breakdown in layman’s terms of complex and overlapping events. and love that AI didn’t summarize this for me too! YOU DID. Thank you. I’ve shared this out with many people and I’m grateful for your voice.
Thank you for writing this and being so thorough on your references and linked studies. I’ve been a digital marketer for 18 years and it is blowing my mind how blindly businesses are investing in AI with zero question on the ethical, humanitarian and environmental implications. Is there any leadership in the world talking about this?
Google has held the golden ticket for far to long. It’s time to educate the masses and let people know the alternatives. I have noticed Reddit showing up in the top position and how Google’s once “relevance north star” seems to have taken a turn, which will hurt them if they don’t fix that.
I personally skip over the AI suggestions as I find them annoying and would rather interact with real people’s ideas. So sorry you and so many like you are taking the brunt of this and am glad to hear you are looking for alternatives. Inspires me to also look to move my clients marketing dollars elsewhere too.
I follow most of the content creators on substack now. I feel that space seems more geniune with actual human voices! I am less prone to open emails – but I will open substack notifications in my email.
I think you are on to something as far as this content is concerned though. Hope you keep digging here!
Interesting to hear about Substack! It’s not something I’ve really delved into yet (who has the time for yet another platform??), but it’s on my radar for the future. Thanks so much for reading!
AI isn’t the only thing killing your blog. I strongly suspect that lecturing people on politics is also hurting your business. I enjoy your travel advice, and I’ll check back to see if you have information about some future destination that I may have in mind. Everyone knows where to go to have their political opinions reinforced. And this ain’t it (for me, at least). Unsubscribing…probably to your delight. Caio.
This isn’t an airport, John. No need to announce your departure. Travel is political, and I am a human affected by global political decisions – as are you! To stay silent on certain issues is not something I can do, and I literally don’t care if you unsubscribe. BYE.
Excellent response – I’ll proudly subscribe to a travel blogger who is conscious of global politics and educated people on AI.
I was referred by Nomadic Matt to your article, and I’m glad I clicked. I had no idea this was affecting travel bloggers so much. Thank you!
You lost ignorant John, but you definitely gained me as a subscriber!!
Welcome, Sierra! I’m glad you found me!
Love this response and love that you *do* see how travel is inherently political. That’s what made me start following you on insta yeaaaars ago!! Rooting for you!!
I want to like this response a million times over. These IDIOTS who do not put the hours into their business and just punch a clock sicken me. I have. blog that has ZERO Traffic from Google ALL of my Traffic comes from Duck Duck Go, Bing, Direct, Social Media or some other place. I work harder now than I have before to make a fraction of what I used to EARN – YES EARN. I would like for this IDIOT’s (Too Harsh) Employer to DEMAND they work the same schedule but cut their pay down to 10%.
One reason that Google is the most-used search engine is, quite simply, because tech support likes to advise everyone who calls them to switch to it instead of troubleshooting the problem. No matter what problem with your internet access you describe, the second question tech support will ask you (after “Have you tried clearing your cache?”) is “Have you tried switcing to Google?” The more people follow this advice, the more Google will become the most-used search engine.
If your website is not compatible with ALL the major search engines, your developers haven’t finished doing their job.
Eh, I think Google being the first major search engine and them having Chrome installed as the default browser on most Android devices is probably more responsible for their monopoly on search than tech support.
Hello Amanda and Friends,
There is a new front for real travel creators to fight back: bloggerstan(dot)com. Literally, “land of the bloggers” (and vloggers and podcasters).
Creators join the site and add their location-specific travel content as listings. No cost or limit on the number of listings. Each listing has a GO! button that takes visitors to your original content on a Do Follow link.
Best example: choose (or type) Ireland from the Home page drop down list. When you see the map, click on the star icon (all of Ireland). You can see that the 60 or so listings are searchable by topic.
Membership is limited to real creators… a profile and photo (usually pasted from your site or channel) are required. (We are real people too, as you can see on About Us.) Users of the site can see your profile and click to see all your listings, regardless of location.
We ban AI content and randomly run original blog posts through an (admittedly limited) AI detector. Users and creators can report suspicious listings.
It’s early days, but, with support from creators, Bloggerstan will climb the search rankings, surfacing travel creator content that Google has buried. This should improve traffic for creators’ sites and channels.
What’s in it for us? Apart from doing the right thing for travel creators and the public, we hope to sell location-specific advertising some day.
Please have a look at Bloggerstan. If you like it, please join and add your listings. And spread the word.
For inquiries, please contact me at eric(at)bloggerstan.com
Thanks!
Hi Amanda,
Thanks for sharing all this information, I do know how AI has ruined things for a lot of small publishers and travel bloggers like me! I used to get 5000-10,000 views on every post( been at this 8 yrs and 2 yrs before that I was just doing fashion blogging) , now I am lucky if I get 200-300..PFFFTT! I despise google and what they have done with their core updates and favoring big travel companies/publisher who have the bucks to pay to rank! AI yes has ruined a lot for us too.
I totally agree AI can not convey personal first hand experiences in a destination like we can! It remains to be seen what will happen. Like you though, I am not stopping . i love what I do and I aim to keep providing expert content and experiences to my audience. Hang in there!
Valerie
http://www.mapleleopard.com
I keep coming back to this post. There’s SO much good information and insight packed into it. Nothing to add on my end, other than thank you for writing this on behalf of all bloggers.
That means a lot coming from you, Kristin! Thanks for reading.
Hi Amanda,
I found your blog from the Travel Creator’s newsletter. I completely agree that Google organic search totally sucks and has since they implemented AI results. I did not know, however, about travel AI influencers. Woah!
For travel professionals, that alone presents a great opportunity to create real community with their specific audience and even more reason to have a very niche audience. Nothing will replace human, in-person connection. For travel bloggers such as yourself, it’s definitely more of a challenge. You’ve built so much, please don’t quit! I would bet that it’s probably very much the same for smaller finance bloggers, too.
I totally agree with what you said that Google’s mission is to keep people on their platform for as long as possible in hopes of clicks on sponsored ads. That’s exactly how the Meta platforms are now, too, as their focus is not the users on the platform, but their own financial bottom line.
Best of success to you!
Hi Amanda – fellow Ohioan here, recently returned from 20 years in NYC (I believe we’ve communicated in the past!).
I was directed to this post by Dalene Heck, and I think it’s abominable what Google has done to smaller content producers like so many of the travel bloggers I’ve come to deeply appreciate over the past 13 years. Insofar as Google not being able to fix/reverse the issue, I call BS – they’re a tech company – of COURSE they can fix their own inanity.
Great post and info here, despite that it makes me so angry on your behalf. Hang in there and I hope other income streams continue to do well for you.
Even if Google wanted to “fix” search results, I’m pretty convinced that they don’t even know what went wrong to slap so many actual good sites with “unhelpful” labels. And they certainly won’t take the time to manually fix things. I think this is just how the internet is going to be now. 🙁
Great post and beautiful photos. Glad you are not quitting because of AI. Sure, AI can make pretty images, write stuff, and even be a useful tool for certain applications. However, it cannot replicate human emotions and the human experience. AI cannot relate a lived story. We, us humans, still hold creativity and authenticity over the bots, at least for now lol
I agree! AI simply can’t replicate the lived human experience. I hope people keep that in mind as they continue to consume creative content!
I’ve been ready your blog for many years and enjoy most of your posts; good content will always find a way to the surface. I believe that free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity. Unfortunately, this isn’t the world we live in. The Oligarchs have initiated a pay to play agenda and it’s going to be hard to stop. There is a TV series on Prime called “Continuum” and it’s about time travel. The characters are from the 2070’s and we no longer have a democracy but a corporate council. You may not even need to be able to time-travel to see this happening. The rule of law no longer governs our society.
Sadly this is all true! At this rate, who knows how much longer any of us will still have jobs.
Hi Amanda! Long-time reader and fellow travel blogger here ✋ I just wanted to leave you a comment saying THANK YOU for this comprehensive overview about the rise of AI and how it’s affecting small publishers like you and me. As you well know, you’re in good company when it comes to drastic dips in search traffic.
My own site was just shy of the Mediavine monthly page view requirements and was holding fairly steady all of last year, then my traffic tanked by around 60% at the end of November. It’s disheartening, but in a weird way I’m glad that my blog is still “just” a hobby (albeit a time intensive one!) because I truly don’t know what I’d do if it’s where my income was coming from.
I’ll definitely be sharing this post with friends and family members who don’t yet understand the negative impact that AI is having both on small publishers and the environment. Whatever happens, I do hope that you continue blogging long-term in some way, because I love being able to turn to a fellow Midwesterner like you for travel advice!
I definitely hope I can continue traveling and blogging for many years to come, but we’ll just have to see what happens in the coming years.
Amanda thank you SO much for really spelling this out. Just so frustrating!
I find your content SO unbelievably helpful. I’m so glad I found your blog years ago – you provide just the exact type of info I want – honest, thorough and thoughtful.
I am glad you shared what we can do to support you – I have added your site to my super handy bookmarks that I click on all the time! I want to help as I will give you as many views as I can! 🙂
I appreciate that so much, Steph!
Terrific post, Amanda! Thank you for taking the time to write it, especially when doing such a “deep dive” must have been demoralizing at points. I’m a long-time subscriber, but I’ll be making more of an effort to spread the word about your amazing blog to friends.
I also appreciate your highlighting the environmental impact of AI. As a professor, I worry we’re losing the battle to convince most young people that AI needs to be approached *very* carefully, but environmental issues often resonate strongly with their generation. Many of my students also have YouTube channels and dream of making it as influencers. I wonder if education about AI that focuses more on the environmental and human costs might have a greater impact than cautionary tales about inaccurate information and endless admonitions about plagiarism.
Yes, I definitely think that focusing on the environmental impacts of AI and the human costs probably will resonate more strongly with most people, especially if they don’t create content themselves, or if they assume that they won’t ever be affected by the tech side of it.
I have been a follower for many years, and I just signed up for your email list. I knew AI was effecting small businesses but I didnt know the ins and outs of it, so thank you for sharing this information. Your site is always one of the first places I look when planning a trip, thinking about visiting a destination, or just curious about someplace in our world. As long as you keep writing I will keep reading.
I appreciate that so much!
You should look into the story of Suchir Balaji. Tucker Carlson recently did a show with his mother I think would be of most interest to you and others who share your experience.
Really great post, Amanda! I think most people would say that they prefer supporting small creators and getting travel advice from actual humans, but MAN does big tech make it hard to do so without some effort. (Especially for folks who don’t realize what they’re seeing when they get Google’s AI results…!)
Just signed up for your email list after being a reader for maaany years and will continue to visit the site as I plan my own travels. Wishing you well!
Thanks, Kelly! Yes, most people have no clue where AI is really “getting” its answers from, which is one of the reasons I wrote this!
Stella post, Amanda!
Relatable, passionate and easy to understand.
I’ve been sharing it with professional travel blogger groups over here in the UK.
Thanks so much, Alastair! I appreciate that.
Great post! As a travel blogger myself, I regularly use small blogs to help me plan my trips. I love getting the personal, curated recommendations especially with some entertaining commentary and enthusiasm. Also, being able to get warnings and tips from real, experienced travellers is priceless to me!
Keep up the great work, Amanda!
I’m the same way, Sue! I love reading others’ tips when I’m planning a trip to a new place!
Well said. I thinks it’s disgraceful what the greedy Google is up to. They use to be a trusted search engine and I thought very highly of the organization. But recently they have totally lost my trust and I now use Duck Duck Go, I also wrote a scathing Google review on their corporate Google site. And btw I don’t have any vested interest other than I hate getting useless results in my searches. I now add the term travel blogger to any of my searches.
It’s comments like these from normal internet users about how bad search results are lately that continue to assure me that I’m not crazy on this!
Thanks for writing at length about this. The AI overview is annoying and for the moment unreliable, but I’m sure that this will evolve and improve.
What is the worst is that they are getting away with not attributing data/content to the rightful creator/owner. Can you imagine Disney letting anyone get away with that?!
Yes, big tech calls all the shots and it will be some time before regulators (and then enforcers) catch up with their “pioneering” ways!
Yes, you will have to change your strategies in the meantime to retain an income.
There are always class actions taking place against Google AND winning, usually for the misuse of data – no surprises there, right?!
I hope you can band together with other personal/small bloggers and do this.
I stumbled across you looking for Morocco travel tips as the FB groups I looked at were all rubbish! It IS authentic content that will genuinely count in the future and we need to find ways of protecting it. Good luck!
I do not have any hope for any sort of regulations or big cases won against the likes of Google in the coming 4 years, unfortunately. In fact, I’m expecting the online experience to just get worse with Musk and Zuckerberg in charge.
Thank you for your well writing article about how Google’s algorithm changes and AI-generated content has not only affected authentic travel blogs like ours, but also how people looking for authentic travel advice are manipulated, and how readers can take back control of what they read.
If my content was being pushed out of search results by better content, I wouldn’t be so mad. (I mean, I’d be mad, but more at myself!) But the fact that good content is getting pushed out by crappy AI info (that is often just wrong) is what makes it worse. People aren’t able to find the information they want, and THAT is really the worst part.
Loved your post–so thoughtful and thorough.
Had a long response but hit a bad key (bad keyboard, bad!) and lost it all. So, I will just agree with you and the insightful commenters. And search for small bloggers while ignoring AI crap.
Perhaps there is a Rebel Alliance growing somewhere, in some space, that will turn folks from the dark side to rise up and restore OCCs (original content creators) and proofreaders and editors and small town newspapers and–sorry, I get carried away. (But maybe there really is a rebel alliance that could become the Rebel Alliance? Has anyone looked?)
Lastly, I enjoyed your beautiful photos repurposed so winningly with captions evoking (to me, at least) Alice in Wonderland and Lord of the Rings. (Loved you feeding the Google flamingos.)
I’ll keep reading your posts (even though it’s with magnifying glasses as I just had cataract surgery) and searching for the AI “reset” button.
Thanks so much for the support, Linda! I wish there were some sort of Rebel Alliance out there, but unfortunately I only see this getting worse in the next 4 years with the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg working behind the scenes to be the arbiters of all online information. It’s a scary time for sure.
The book industry is booming, why not pivot to self publishing a book based on your blog and travels with pictures?
I’m not sure it really is booming in a way that is super profitable for the average indie author. I have several friends who have published memoirs and other travel books in the last 2 years, and can assure you they don’t make anywhere close to a full year’s salary from one book – and that’s with a traditional publisher! I don’t want to write guidebooks, and also don’t have any desire to write a memoir. Writing a book has oddly never been a dream of mine!
I run blogs on very different subjects than you do (virtual worlds, tech, Russia, Central Asia, getting things done, local NYC events, etc.) and I have never tried to chase traffic as it is just a side hobby. I have Google ads and I have noticed over the years that I went from making $100+ every month to $30 every 3 months, thus meaning payouts come very seldom. The net-nannying requirements have increased. I find the hits on links that lead to my book or content within SL do better with sales than Google ads — although I realize your experience is that your books or itineraries offered didn’t do as well. I don’t personally think it’s possible to fight any of the phenomenon you describe – accurately! — at the root. ChaptGPT has taken away my translation jobs, for example, and reduced me at best to an AI janitor. I am intrigued, however, by your guerilla tactics for how to click once you get the search returns — this is gold.
So let’s say I look up “things to do in Penn Yan, NY,” one of my favourite old Upstate towns we used to live in. I go past the AI — this is ALWAYS annoying and even misleading on ANY topics I find, whether travel or the war in Ukraine. I go past the “Sponsored Links” of course. I go past “Trip Advisor” and “Reddit” which — exactly as you say, is out of date (and on my topics I find it YEARS out of date sometimes). I am now “below the fold” in newspaper terms but here’s where I would click on a local blog of an actual B&B or other local business, or, say “Yates County Historical Society,” which I have visited, and is very useful, or Finger Lakes Association, which is a local organization encouraging tourism. So I feel empowered. I recognize some of those local businesses I have actually patronized over the years, now at the bottom of the search returns page or even deeper into the next page! Awful! But I can work to access them, so I feel empowered. Thanks for your insights. This will be my pattern of behaviour from now on.
Most of the content is indeed still there, but it’s a little hard to find these days. I hope more people will discover how to skip the AI crap and find real websites again, though. Every little bit helps!
First of all: I really like your content and enjoy following your trips! And I’m sorry to hear that you are losing income, on a personal level, because I know that you spend a lot of time creating content.
It’s certainly interesting to read about all of this and explains what I have noticed, too (the decrease in quality of Google search results)
But stepping back, I cannot help but notice: your income is based on people being directed by a company offering its services for “free” and that generating income from ads. If we take this model away from the digital space, it would be as if you are relying on an airline to bring people to your hotel for free and now complaining that the airline changed its flight schedule. You are not entitled to get traffic from Google. I agree that for their own good, they’d better improve their search results again, but ultimately it’s up to them to do whatever they want. They helped you and all other bloggers for some time because it was beneficial for them, but if they change their system, you can hardly blame them just because it affects you. You don’t pay for their services, after all.
The use of blog posts in AI is of course a different story. I’m an IP lawyer, so I shold know. But to be honest, I don’t have an answer for that either. The question is whether linking to the source is so different from citing something in a scientific article. Usually, when I read something in one paper, I don’t have a need for reading the original paper, either. But no one would say that citing a paper is a copyright infringement.
One option you mention is a paywall. And I guess that is where things are ultimately headed. To protect from AI “crawling” on your side and to ensure quality of the information on the reader’s side. Obviously, this will change your business model significantly, but I must admit that the whole blogging business always seemed a fluke to me.
Lastly – AI is not causing significant environmental harm. Data centers only contributing to 1 to 2% of energy consumption, according to the World Energy Outlook 2024 by the IEA, and only 1% of that is probably caused by AI. Let’s face it – you would have to do many many unnecessary AI searches before you ever come close to the carbon footprint caused by continuous travelling. And I’m not saying that to shame travelling (I travel quite a lot myself), but just to put things into perspective. AI has problems, but environmental impact is not one of them.
To end on a positive note: I really hope that despite all these changes, you will find a spot to do whatever you love and earn money doing that!
The problem is that Google has a monopoly on search (they’re in lawsuits over it, as I’m sure you’re aware). And so while you are correct that Google doesn’t “owe” anyone traffic, they also have a monopoly on search results and seem to be making changes that target a certain subset of websites (i.e. small publishers), which has not happened before. I get where you’re coming from, but it’s not really the same as “an airline bringing people to a hotel for free” because in the hotel’s case, there would be other ways for people to find, book, and get to that hotel. If Google did not have a monopoly on search, the effects of their changes wouldn’t be felt as hard, and I probably wouldn’t have written this post!
As for AI, I do think the environmental concerns are real – but I also know it’s futile to care about, because these megacorps are not gonna pull back. Google’s greenhouse emissions increased 13% in 2023 alone, which is not nothing. I included that section on AI energy/water use because the vast majority of people don’t even think about technology using ANY energy, and I think it’s worth being aware of. Everyone’s aware of the carbon emissions of celebrities using their private jets, so it’s only fair to try to make people aware that processing stupid AI queries also uses resources.
Thank you for this blog post and wish good luck to you and all of us who feel dread for the future.
As another commenter suggested, what readers can do to help bloggers is to skip past the AI results and click on a blog. Google learns from mass behaviours – if they see people not clicking on the Reddit, TripAdvisor and other truly Unhelpful Content, and on blogs, they’ll move them back up. They should do the same query though – don’t just add ‘travel blog’ to stand a better chance of the search engine serving up what you want. If enough people do that, it can change things.
There’s another thing in the Google search engine ingredients leak from last year that I’m fascinated by, and have a bit of a theory about and that’s the social engagement metrics stuff. Google’s people swear up and down that they don’t use social data in ranking, and yet there’s a whole complex, maintained, expensive API just sitting there in the ingredients cupboard. Given how Google reps have been proven to deny things that turned out to be true, I’m suspicious. What seals it for me is that the almost all of the sites hit in the late 2023/early 2024 Google updates all had something in common – really low engagement on social. They might have had tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, but when they post infrequently and the followers to likes ratio is 100,000:30, that’s going to look off. It makes sense – Google told us they don’t care about social media numbers, and social doesn’t drive clicks relative to the effort required to be active and engaging. But what if they do care? What if the measure of ‘this blogger is trustworthy’ is ‘this blogger is out there, living the life they’re writing about, posting about it on social’?
All that to say – if you’re a reader of a blog, interact with that blogger on social – Facebook/IG or wherever they are – attention is the currency of the internet and it might just be Google is keeping score of that too.
Yes, that’s a good point about social engagement! I have always believed that sharing links to content on the likes of Facebook and Pinterest helped with rankings, especially if that link got some decent interaction. The same with backlinks – Google for a while swore they really didn’t matter, but I never believed that for a second. I think having a “brand” these days is probably more important than ever, even though it’s hard to build one with a small, one-person website.
Thanks for the great article Amanda. I agree with everything you said regarding AI and Google prioritizing big business in search results.
I am one of the unlucky travel bloggers who lost more than 99% of my traffic. Unfortunately, many of us have not played the popularity/social media game, so no one cares. The more sharing their story, the better. To be honest, I preferred to stay more anonymous and focus more on my content, rather than advertising myself as many influencers do today. To each their own – it’s just not my style. I am fine with everyone doing their own unique thing. I see social media as extra page views, not my main source of traffic. I don’t even use social media in my everyday life.
I started blogging 12 years ago and reached a high of 400,000 page views with over 6000 clicks per day just from Google. Yesterday, I received 2 clicks from Google. For years, I made over $4000 a month, today I am lucky if I make $100. This has been truly depressing as this is my only site and my only source of income.
Replacing me in Search the past few years are big businesses i.e. resorts, attractions, and tour groups, small blogs that copy my ideas and content, and content mills that use AI. As one example out of many, I am now outranked for a search query I created back in 2015 (things to do in Orlando besides theme parks). For years, I outranked big sites like Tripadvisor, Visit Orlando, and Westgate. I was ranked #1 for “things to do in Orlando” as well as “things to do in Orlando besides theme parks” for years. Today, these sites are still on Page 1 for the same article and I sit on Page 18 for the same article. Small newer bloggers (started blogging between 2020-2023) who copied my unique idea continue to rank on page 2-10 even though they stole my idea and oftentimes paraphrase my content. If these new bloggers cannot outrank Trip Advisor for this query and I did so for many years, how can these same bloggers outrank me today?
For years, I ranked in the 0-1 position for hundreds of articles. Today, most of these articles are indexed, but shadowbanned as copycats and big businesses continue to take my place even though most use stock photos and have very little evidence of first hand experience. I use no AI, take no sponsored trips, use zero stock photos, and write 100% of the content by myself. My husband (a web developer and designer) designs the site and works on all tech issues. We are a 2 person site, not a huge content mill.
I think more blame also needs to be placed on small bloggers who copy others hard work, not just big businesses. They are both the problem, in my opinion. I see many small new bloggers who have dozens of articles that are “just too similar to mine.” Sure, a few articles being similar in nature is fine, but when a blogger has 75 articles with the same title as me, it’s a bit suspicious as if they are copying my entire sitemap. I also saw my site advertised on a black hat SEO site in 2020 as a site to consider for reverse engineering. This just happens to be exactly when I noticed many copycats coming on the scene. I have worked hard to get this content, living in 20 cities in over 10 states in the past decade.
I have sent in many DMCA requests, most of which have been approved (besides 2 big businesses). If I ever get the time, I will pursue more. I am fine with new bloggers producing new content, not “repurposing” my content. Perhaps they need to be a bit more creative and produce their own material, instead of attempting to rank by “improving upon” my original thoughts and ideas.
I’m sorry that has happened to you, Maureen. Unfortunately there’s no barrier to starting a website these days, and plenty of people do it with bad intentions (i.e. make a quick buck by stealing ideas and content from others in order to monetize as fast as possible).
I’m always telling clients to stop putting all their time and effort into “rented” space via social media channels and also put work into their own websites. Turns out for many that was “rented” space too.
One of the extra challenges now is that many bloggers and website owners are now looking to get other work where there isn’t much. Its a nasty vicious circle and I miss the 90s! Well let’s be honest I miss the 80s what I remember of it!!
Yes, AI is replacing a lot of freelance writing/editing jobs these days, too, which makes it extra difficult! It also doesn’t help that, despite me doing this job for 15 years now, plenty of people still don’t consider it real “work,” and minimize the skills and experience I’ve gained from it.
Thank you for shedding light on this issue—your frustration is deeply valid. It’s heartbreaking to see years of hard work and dedication undermined by algorithm changes and AI content proliferation. Small publishers like you bring a unique and personal touch to travel content that larger entities just can’t replicate. I hope readers and platforms alike recognize the value of independent voices and work towards solutions that ensure creators like you can thrive in this evolving digital landscape.
I think this is the second time I’ve read this, but I want to add different comments. It’s not true that AI cannot be reset. It may be true that it can only be reset to start over though. The beginning of that learning is indeed clumsy and just weird. I also believe that you can exclude some “training” and make it perhaps semi blind, at least for a while. But when you have the whole internet as its input data that’s not going to be probable.
I too am frustrated about current searches and the bad info I get from them. I wish I knew how to do more than boycott those search engines.
I value websites such as yours and have benefitted from them! (A recent trip to Michigan was memorable, in part, from your MI guide). I share you and a few other favorite travel bloggers with friends and family…. just passed your information on last week, to two of my children.
I will always try to seek out my favorite travel bloggers, and skip over AI if at all possible! I hate what is happening.
I just want you to know I appreciate your hard work and efforts.
I so appreciate all of that, Brenda!
Fantastic read and thank you for bringing this to light for so many content creators. I’m one of the very unlucky ones who lost 98.5% of my traffic on a site I poured my heart and soul into. We will see how things turn out! Saving this to reread a few times – you’ve got some great info here!
Ugh I’m so sorry to hear that, Sarah. I hope there’s some hope for us all in the future.
Well written and thank you for shedding light on this topic. I have always enjoyed your newsletters and will continue to bookmark you as my go to travel site. Hang in there!
Thanks for sharing all of this. It has been rough to watch so many bloggers get struck down by these changes.
It’s been rough for me to watch friends lose their businesses entirely. 🙁
Thanks for this behind the scenes look – it is super informative and helpful for those of us not experiencing this directly. I subscribe to your blog via a feed aggregator, follow you on Insta, and get your newsletter. I always check your site directly (along with a few other trusted travel blogs like Earth Trekkers) when planning a trip because personal experiences are so much more meaningful than anything a AI can generate. So I’m rooting for for you! Hope you can navigate these waters and make it through OK.
Thanks so much, Sara! I appreciate all the effort to actually get your travel information from real people, and am honored that I am one of those sourses you trust!
Wow! I’ve had my head stuck in the sand for sometime, I had no idea about most of what you’ve written about. Clearly, we are moving in the wrong direction in regards to AI and small online blog business. Thank you for opening my eyes to this disaster, I will be making more informed choices when needing an internet search.
It’s a topic that’s talked about a lot within blogging circles, but I know that the average reader/internet user just doesn’t know. Hence why I wrote this! I appreciate you reading.
Thank you for writing this post. I could have written pretty much all of it myself, and I know many other (travel) bloggers who would wholeheartedly agree as well.
Yes, the Internet evolves, and it is not just Google that develops and uses AI. The floodgates are open and there is no turning back.
But it is indeed frustrating, maddening even, to see Google and others essentially steal your content and to present it as theirs. Some AI services do list sources every now and then, but usually in such a way that few – if any – people will click through.
That said, you’ve got a fantastic blog. Highlight the FACT that while AI services can pretend to know what they are talking about, only you can share human-feet-on-the-ground insight and information. And that you do, with authority, honesty, and style.
I definitely do highlight that everything on this site is written by a real human and based on actual travel experience – but the fact is that many people simply don’t care, and those who do care have a much smaller chance of actually finding my content these days. I know my content is good, though, and I’ll continue creating it as long as I can!
Cookie please! 😉 I am a reader, and I love hearing people’s personal stories and experiences. I get so annoyed when AI tries to give me information, and so often it’s outdated or just plain wrong. Keep doing your thang! Maybe AI will destroy itself. One can hope…
One can indeed hope. I just wanna know where the AI is going to get all its info once people stop updating and publishing new content. Wish I could send you a real cookie! Thanks for reading.
For what it is worth, I too am frustrated with AI. And, even in Safari I see too much generated “stuff” that I either know as wrong or actually contradicts itself.
As I read your article I started thinking maybe it is time to switch to where I can control the search. I used to hate Bing, but lately Google is no better and often much worse.
As for your blogs, I’m unaware of where they are outside of this newsletter. Most likely because I’m not on social media.
I do think about your posts and often read them all the way through. Traveling doesn’t always allow me to though. Please don’t go behind a paywall though.
As a thought I get a newsletter from a Bill who often talks about assorted things and I suspect would love to cover this sort of issue and how to help fix it. His last name escapes me and I cannot at the moment get to it.
Wishing you many more years of success.
And comments like yours – coming from just a normal person who uses search engines – only underline everything I’ve assumed lately about how average people don’t actually want or like all these changes. The people running Google (and Meta and Microsoft) are so out of touch with reality, and believe everyone is just as in love with AI as they are, even though we are not!
As for where to find me, you’re on my website right now, and that’s the best place! I hope I never have to go behind a paywall, but that’s the way the internet as a whole might be heading, sadly. (SO many of the articles I wanted to link to in this post were behind paywalls!)
I would encourage you to reach out to bill murphy nt. He’s gotten quite good and getting around paywalls.
I’m not sure where my head was about where your blog was, of course when I chose read more I was thrown onto the internet😇 I’m glad to hear this is your primary outlet as Facebook and instagram as basically paywalls to me, or rather security walls! Perhaps I was thinking more of what YouTube was experiencing.
Hang in there. I’ll do better at clicking onto the web, even when I’m out of time, hopefully that’ll help some.
Thank you for writing this. You’ve said everything I could never put into words, plus some stuff I didn’t even know about. The last year or so has been so stressful and discouraging as a blogger. My “main” site was one of the sites pretty much obliterated by the updates, going from 150k sessions a month (it was 500k before the pandemic but whatever) down to about 15k sessions a month now. I don’t even touch the site anymore because $5 a day of income isn’t worth my effort. I’m just glad my Berlin site is surviving reasonably so far. It was hit a little in August but still chugging along enough to think I can keep growing the site and more importantly the income. I know we always have to adapt, but this is way different.
This IS so different. I understand that the internet is always going to be changing and evolving, but this has been such a big, negative change all at once, and there’s really no good way to pivot in a way that’s viable for most people. I’m sorry you’ve been feeling it, too!