Almost two years ago in a moment of inspiration and despair I wrote a post about how Google was killing blogging. Ironically that post has been the highest performing post on this site since that day, which is something that makes me laugh almost as much as it makes me want to cry.
Today, I have even more bad news to share. Blogging is dead. Full stop. Dramatic? Maybe a tad.
And yet…Thousands of blogs have vanished from the internet, and many more (ME) are making a fraction of the income they produced in what we will call the Glory Years.
“Tell us about the Glory Years, Grandpa!” you might cry out.
“Well kids, the Glory Years…That was way back when the internet was fresh, and young, and a man could find a plot of land, spit on his hands, grab a shovel and get to digging a foundation for something. Ahh, yes those sweet days of yore, before antibiotics and ChatGPT, when you had to look to the stars at night to guide you home when you got lost during a night out on the town.”
Those Glory Years, where a little blog like ours could turn a dream of sharing travel tips into an income that allowed that travel to continue. Where we reached an audience looking for a piece of that dream for themselves, and imparted our little wisdoms and our cheeky advice to help make their travel adventures come to fruition.
Is Blogging Really D-E-A-D?
There are those who will tell you that after a brief hiatus between 2023 and 2025 blogging is back on the rise, and that blogs are still an important piece of internet anatomy. Sort of like the human appendix, or tonsils. Crucial to the proper homeostasis, integral to health…until they start getting all angry and inflamed and some doctor says you either get em cut out or you die. That’s a bit like where blogging is right now.
The way people interact with the internet has changed drastically over the last decade. We covered a lot of this in our 2024 article, but since then things have progressed, or regressed if you want to look at it that way, even more drastically.
Google users are far less likely to click on a search result when there is an AI summary present, according to the PEW Research Center. As of October 2025 77% percent of all mobile Google searches (those made when you are on your phone walking down the street and not paying attention to where you are going) end without a click. 3 out of 4 times someone searches for something on Google these days while using their phone they don’t end up clicking on any of the results. “Well, shit” you might wonder “that’s a bit odd, isn’t it?”
Wrong. It’s not odd. In fact, it’s all part of the plan. The plan to get you to never leave whatever platform you are currently on, and to suck up those sweet sweet ads (like the ones on this site!) so that Google can go on being the largest pusher of advertising in the history of the world.
In the end, that little bit of info you were looking for that might have been on someone’s blog. The reason you didn’t actually click on the blog? Because Google answered the question before you even got a chance to scan the results to find it yourself. And where did Google get that answer? It took it, from the blog. And it didn’t even leave a lump of coal in the Christmas stocking.
The Slopularity
Which brings us to the main point of this TED talk. AI. Dum-dum-dum, dramatic music swells as the big bad AI enters the room, scanning the crowd with its laser eyes.
AI summaries are one way for Google to stay in the game and steal as much of the internet as it can steal before its business model becomes as outdated as blogging. Because, here’s the rub – Enemy AI threatens to put Google out of business too. What purpose will Google serve once ChatGPT takes over as the largest search engine in the world? The thought of it must send shivers down the spines of Google’s Board of Directors. The only way forward, they probably surmise, is to build an AI of their own! And to do it in a way that convinces GenZ to ditch TikTok and embrace the AnswerBot.
Meanwhile, the Slopiffication is fully slopping. As of October 2025 50% of all new published content on the open web is AI generated. That’s right, HALF. And sister, you better believe that number is only going to go up and up. Where will the slop stop? Nobody really knows.
There are theories, however.
Some of them are fun theories, theories that AI will get the digital equivalent of Mad Cows Disease as it begins to learn mostly from other AI generated content, resulting in a giant mountain of sloppy slop. Think of a giant pile of all the thousands of cows we had to kill because some idiot decided that feeding cows the brains of other cows would make them more beefy, and then just turn that giant mountain of cows into slop. That would be the fun theory.
Some less fun theories end with the destruction of humanity by 2035 (at the latest).
But, in the end these are just theories, and we don’t really have a clue WHERE all of this is going. We don’t really know WHY it’s going to the place that we don’t know it is going to, either. We aren’t even really sure on HOW we will get to the place that we don’t know why we are going to. All we know is that all of a sudden a bunch of really Rich Guys got very interested in developing AI faster than some other really Rich Guys, and then there was some fear about “Oh no, what if China does it first” and lo-n-behold you got yourself a Manhattan Project style race. A race to what? Is it AGI or is it to the Sloppiest Slop That Ever Slopped? Are we heading towards a Singularity or are we destined for what we truly deserve, the Slopularity?
Your guess is as good as mine. I’m just a travel blogger with a dead blog.
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