|
Let's Talk About It · September 2026
Your Traffic Is Down. Here’s Why - and What’s Working.
We see this conversation happening with clients every week right now and we want to have it with you too. The numbers are real, the path forward is hopeful, and you’re not imagining any of it!!
|
|
Hey friend!
We’ve been having a version of this conversation with almost every client we work with right now, and we think it needs to live in this newsletter too. This is totally not a doom and gloom post, it's a hopeful one! We have real data, so you can make good decisions instead of anxious ones.
If your traffic is down and your ad revenue is down and you’ve been wondering whether it’s something you did or whether something bigger is happening — it’s the second one. And the fact that you’re paying attention to it right now puts you ahead of a lot of people.
|
Okay here’s what the data shows (and it’s a lot)
One food blogger watched her traffic fall from close to a million monthly pageviews to under 200,000. Not because her content got worse or because she stopped posting. It was because Google’s AI Overviews started answering exactly the questions her posts were built to rank for, down to “how to cut a banana.” That query used to send someone to her site. Now it sends them nowhere. The AI handled it.
That story is not unusual. A survey of 50 bloggers found more than 20 of them reporting the same trajectory: thousands of dollars a month in Mediavine and Raptive income, steadily eroded as organic traffic dropped. One blogger was earning $6,000 a month from display ads. Same RPM, same quality, same niche — and now making under $2,500 because the traffic that fed the machine is gone. Her exact words were: “The maths just doesn’t work anymore. The only thing that changed was Google.”
|
|
The numbers publishers are reporting in 2026
|
30–67%
year-over-year ad revenue drops reported by publishers relying primarily on display advertising
|
89%
of news SEO experts surveyed expect AI Overviews and AI Mode to continue impacting publisher traffic in 2026
|
|
|
Why this is happening and why it’s not going to reverse
The formula that built this industry was simple: write a recipe, rank on Google, someone clicks, sees ads, you get paid. That formula required Google to send the person to you. Google has decided it would rather answer the question itself. When an AI Overview appears at the top of a search result, click-through rates drop 34 to 61 percent on that query. No click means no pageview. No pageview means no ad impression. No ad impression means no revenue.
And the types of content most affected are the ones food bloggers have spent years building: informational queries. How long to bake a potato. What to substitute for buttermilk. How to cut a banana. AI handles all of it now. But here’s what’s actually hopeful about that: the content AI can’t replicate — your opinionated, tested, personal recipe with your actual story and your actual voice — is still earning clicks. In some cases more than before, because there’s less noise around it. That’s a real thing to build toward.
Beyond the AI issue, Google’s internal priorities have shifted. Its Network segment, which includes Raptive-style publisher payouts, now makes up a much smaller share of Google’s total advertising revenue than it used to. The overwhelming majority of Google’s ad business now comes from its own properties: Search, YouTube, and its own AI features. Publisher payouts are no longer a priority internally. That doesn’t mean it’s going away. It means it’s no longer the center of gravity of Google’s business, and it will be managed accordingly.
|
| |
Our honest take
Your traffic coming from Google was always a byproduct of their business model, not the point of it. That’s just true. But here’s the thing we keep telling clients: understanding that actually frees you up. Because once you stop waiting for Google to fix this, you can start building the version of your business that doesn’t need them to.
|
|
What’s actually working for the bloggers who are doing well
Okay here’s the part we actually love talking about, because this is where it gets genuinely exciting. The same survey that found all those income drops also found something really important. The bloggers who are doing well in 2026 built audiences they own outright. Email lists. Memberships. Direct relationships with people who chose them, not people Google sent their way.
|
| 01 |
Owned audience over borrowed audience
One blogger in the survey has 1,200 paid membership subscribers. That’s it. 1,200 people. And it generates more revenue than her Mediavine income ever did at 200,000 monthly pageviews. An email list, a paid newsletter, a membership community — these are audiences that don’t require Google to do anything for them to be worth something.
|
|
| 02 |
Content that AI can’t replace
AI can answer “how to cut a banana.” It cannot tell someone why your grandmother’s version of that banana pudding is different from every other one online, and why that matters. Your voice, your story, your tested opinion is the moat. Lean into it harder. Not for SEO. Because it’s the one thing that is genuinely difficult to replicate at scale.
|
|
| 03 |
Showing up in AI search, not just Google search
The bloggers who are finding new traffic are the ones getting cited inside AI Overviews and AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Only 38 percent of AI Overview citations come from top-10 Google results. The other 62 percent are coming from pages that aren’t even ranking number one. AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — is how you get your content into that conversation. And the traffic that comes through an AI citation converts at 5x the rate of regular organic traffic. Fewer visits, higher value per visit.
|
|
And here’s the genuinely good news
Here’s the uncomfortable version of the hopeful message: the bloggers who are genuinely okay right now didn’t pivot when the crisis hit. They pivoted before it, when things were still going well and it was easy to think they didn’t need to. They started their email list when they had traffic to convert. They launched their first digital product when they still had a warm audience to sell to. They built an owned audience when the audience was there to be built.
This is still being said because it’s still true and it’s still not too late. But the window gets smaller every quarter that AI Overviews expand and every blogger who reads this and decides to do it later. If you’ve been putting off building something that doesn’t depend entirely on Google, this is us telling you plainly that later is not the safe option it feels like.
|
|
The bottom line
Display ads are not dead. They’re just not a plan by themselves anymore. The bloggers keeping their income — and growing it — are running ads AND owning an email list AND selling something directly AND showing up in AI results. Stack the streams.
|
|
|
Work With Honeycomb Media
We help food bloggers build the version of their business that doesn’t collapse when Google changes something.
SEO strategy, AEO with BeeLine, email marketing, income diversification, content planning, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and full growth retainers. If you want to talk through where your business is and what the next right move looks like, reply and let’s do that.
|
|
