Nobody Owns the Traffic
A four year study tracked 100 blogs that were, in 2022, the proof everyone pointed to. Six-figure income reports, the screenshots people pinned to vision boards, evidence that if you published enough helpful content and ranked it on Google, the money followed.
He checked back this year. The median blog had lost 85% of its search traffic. Twelve were sitting at zero. Two-thirds had lost most of what they’d had.
The easy read is that Google changed its algorithm and AI ate the clicks. Both true. But that framing treats the collapse as weather, something that happened to these businesses from the sky. It wasn’t the weather. Every one of them was built on ground it didn’t own, and the owner finally changed the terms.
Free clicks were always a loan
For a decade, the deal looked like ownership. You published, you ranked, the traffic arrived and kept arriving, so it felt like something you’d built and could keep. It was a loan of attention from a company whose only obligation was to its own users, callable at any time, for reasons you’d never be told.
Google called it. The 2023 Helpful Content update and the 2024 core updates cut the free clicks. Then AI Overviews arrived on roughly half of all searches and cut clicks to the top result by more than half, answering the question before anyone leaves the page. The blogs that died lived on exactly those questions: how to, what is, best ways to. The channel learned to answer them without sending anyone anywhere.
None of those publishers did anything wrong on the day it happened. They had done the wrong thing years earlier by treating a rented channel as a business.
The next landlord is worse
The next big thing now is that AI visibility. Learn how to get cited by ChatGPT, win the answer box, run the same game one layer up.
The same study shows how that goes. Reddit’s share of citations inside ChatGPT dropped from around 60% to 10% in about six weeks, on a single change nobody outside OpenAI got a vote on. AI visibility is the same rental on a shorter lease: a position across surfaces you don’t control, changed continuously by the model providers, invisible until it’s gone. Search at least gave you a ranking you could watch drop.
Where I refuse to rent
This is why I make a few choices that look backwards from the outside.
I publish on LinkedIn most days. It’s the best distribution I have, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But I won’t run a LinkedIn newsletter, and people ask me why, because the subscribers would come for free. That’s the reason. They’d come for free, into LinkedIn’s account, on LinkedIn’s terms, reachable only through the button LinkedIn decides to keep. The day they change how it works or throttle it or fold it into something else, I’ve lost the one thing I was building. So I use LinkedIn to reach people and send them somewhere I own. My newsletter lives on my site. LinkedIn gets my attention. It doesn’t get to hold my audience.
I tell clients the same thing about their websites, and it’s usually where we first disagree. Someone wants to put a real business on Squarespace or one of the hosted builders because it’s fast and cheap and looks fine. For a weekend project, sure. For a business, you’re renting the thing your business runs on. The platform owns the templates, the export, the URLs, the roadmap, and the price. When it raises rates or drops a feature or decides your use case isn’t its priority, you find out how little of it was ever yours.
Owning your site is slower and less convenient at the start, and that is the whole point. It’s yours. You can move it, rebuild it, sell it. Nobody can quietly rewrite the terms underneath you, because the only terms are the ones you set.
What isn’t rented
The blogs that grew through all of this weren’t in a safe niche. There wasn’t one. Finance lost a median of 99%, health 93%, fashion 95%. The survivors were doing something narrower like making things a reader needed them, specifically, to make. A recipe they’d cooked. A pattern tested stitch by stitch and photographed along the way. Firsthand work a search result can’t summarize and hand over.
That’s the part no one can repossess. Not the ranking, not the citation, not the traffic. The work only you could have made, and the audience that shows up because they came looking for you by name.
The study is Daniel Stanica’s “The Great Blogging Collapse,” which tracked 100 income-report blogs from 2022 to 2026. Traffic figures are Semrush estimates; the AI Overview click data is from Ahrefs.