Of the 100 most influential American blogs, over 60 have lost up to 85% of their traffic in just 4 years
What is it about? American SEO specialist, Daniel Stanica, tracked and studied the traffic of over 100 blogs for four years, from the arrival of ChatGPT until today. And his conclusion is clear: blogs are dead! At least, commercial blogs. Those that only serve to attract traffic and generate ad clicks. This model has been gradually buried by Google, and the arrival of AI Overviews (AI summaries in Google) has hammered the final nail in their coffin. Creating content sites just to get ad clicks is no longer acceptable.
Only 21 of the blogs saw their traffic increase or stagnate
His figures are extremely clear. In his panel of 100 sites, most are losing traffic. And that’s an understatement. Most are dead. Without traffic. With little to no chance of recovery. Which isn’t necessarily bad news.
Only a few sites are succeeding and continue to grow. So there are indeed good and bad blogs. While most blogs are collapsing, others are thriving, improving their positions and increasing their profitability. A crucial difference therefore exists between these two categories of sites. A difference that must be absolutely understood if we want to understand which web content is now favored by Google.
This applies to all types of blogs: those for which the blog is a business model, and those whose objective is to support a brand and a company’s reputation. This is what needs to be examined.
Why has traffic decreased?
According to Daniel Stanica, the decline is due to three major reasons, all related to Google.
Google algorithm updates:
- The Helpful Content Update of 2023.
- The 2024 core update
- The arrival of AI Overviews: these famous AI summaries that appear at the top of Google’s search results page and kill incoming traffic to sites. AI Overviews arriving in France in August 2026, many sites will quickly feel the impact. We’re talking about a 58% drop in traffic according to an Ahrefs study.
Daniel Stanica adds that it is the content of these sites themselves that penalizes them:
- Content that is too generic and only answers standard questions, and too often intended to « rank » on Google’s search results pages. Whereas, Google favors authentic, unique, first-hand information. I’ll come back to this later.
- But also sites that rely solely on one acquisition channel and are built entirely to respond to and exploit Google’s algorithm, except that…
The difference between dead blogs and winning blogs
What Daniel Stanica discovered is that the difference lies in the content itself. And, you may or may not be surprised, AI-written content has nothing to do with it. It is indeed the nature of the content in question that makes the difference.
And that’s what you need to remember.
The blogs that are disappearing are those that are easy for AI to summarize or whose content is merely a reproduction of other existing content.
Those that have continued to grow are those that have shared:
- Niche content, but that’s not the most important thing
- Unique demonstrative and experiential content, difficult for an AI to simply summarize, or too unique
- But also sites that have managed to capitalize on their traffic by converting it into newsletter subscribers, for example.
Daniel Stanica’s study thus reveals that the game of visibility in Google has completely changed in the last 4 years. Having a purely SEO strategy is a mistake. SEO can no longer be just one component in an online communication and visibility strategy. A blog should no longer be created to « rank », but should be designed based on the actual service it provides to a prospect or client in their purchasing decision or their need for genuine information.
The New Rules of B2B Blogging
This study by Daniel Stanica primarily makes observations for general public blogs, but it gives us lessons and directions when we talk about B2B. Lessons that confirm several points:
- Multiply your communication channels
- Do not rely on a single channel for publishing your content. Find out which channels your prospects and clients use and publish on each of them.
- Adapt your content to multiple formats: text, audio, video, carousel, downloadable PDF.
- Create truly unique content
- Your content must be your own and not provide information found elsewhere. For this reason, it is important that your content is not generic, but rather genuine content that is unique to you and directly interests your prospects and clients.
- To create this content, you must implement routines that allow you to uncover hidden information within your company (internal conversations, exchanges with your clients, conversations between your sales reps and your prospects and clients, documentation around your products and services, etc.)
- Transform your content into services. Find ways to turn your content into advice tools, information, etc. Your content can be interactive. The advantage is that you can easily reference them, and furthermore, you can make them a means of attraction sought after by your site’s visitors (see article on quizzes)
- Clearly position yourself on an expertise or a niche
- Create content consistent with this niche that is truly your own
Conclusion
For B2B companies, blogs remain a powerful instrument for visibility and influence, but one should not be mistaken.
Too many companies still simply see them as a way to attract any kind of traffic.
However, this approach is increasingly penalized by Google, which primarily seeks to save people time and inform them as effectively as possible with truly authentic and valuable content.
Blogs should no longer be thought of as a means to bring traffic, but as a genuine online service based on a strongly defined and strict editorial line, serving both the interests of prospects and clients, and, increasingly, LLMs.
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