What Blogging Means Today in the Age of AI: My New Approach

For years, blogs have been a popular way to get new information, expert advice, and entertainment.

As a Millennial, I know this because blogs were my main go-to places online whenever I needed help or was just bored. This was especially true during the peak of blogs from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, which happened to be my teenage years.

Whether I was working on school projects, solving math problems, finding cheat codes for my GameBoy emulator, or reading Warcraft tutorials, blogs made my life easier and more fun! In fact, passing my driver’s license exam in 2016 was a lot easier because of the tips I found on a blog.

Thanks to search engines, finding blogs with helpful answers was as easy as clicking a button.

Today, with the rise of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), I might not need to visit a blog to find what I need.

By scraping the internet or using the information it’s trained on, AI can immediately show me the answer to my question. I can even chat with it and solve complex problems by asking more specific questions in a conversation-like manner.

For bloggers like me, this is bad news because if visitors don’t come to my blog, I miss out on important opportunities. These could include gaining new subscribers, making money, or getting more exposure that helps build my reputation and credibility.

However, it’s not the end of the world for bloggers. Just like videos and podcasts didn’t kill blogging, AI won’t either, but it will change how bloggers write and what they include in their posts.

You see, blogging started out as just an online diary. When video and social media arrived, blogs were slowly repurposed and became niche sites or content marketing platforms. AI will have a similar effect on blogging.

I can’t say exactly what blogging will mean in the future, but I think I have an idea.

Above all, as everyone is already saying, AI won’t kill blogging because people need accountability, expertise, and real experiences to solve their problems. I can’t agree more.

If you ask me, an AI chatbot is the last thing I’d go to for advice on my money and health. It’s the same for travel, buying expensive things, and personal relationships.

I’m not going to rely on a probability machine that might have been trained on biased data or have its own biases. We’ve heard about this kind of news before. And simply, AI is prone to errors.

As a travel content creator, I’ve also tried AI chatbots like Google’s Gemini to help plan trips. And guess what? I wasn’t surprised when it suggested an itinerary that seemed impossible or unrealistic.

It planned for me to visit both a palace and a castle outside the city in one morning. They’re about 30 minutes apart, which seemed possible at first. But after checking their opening hours and how long I’d likely spend at each, I realized the plan clearly wouldn’t work.

Comparing AI’s suggestions to real travel blogs and advice from expert planners, I’ve realized that I probably won’t rely on AI for travel planning anytime soon.

The current technology just doesn’t take everything into account—like how far places are from each other, travel time, seasonal events, or operating hours. Plus, I enjoy getting personal tips and recommendations while exploring new places!

While I find AI unhelpful for travel planning and untrustworthy for sensitive topics, I’m really impressed with how well it handles other tasks.

It’s great for things like translation, analyzing data, summarizing information, and even writing simple code. AI has been really helpful to me in many ways.

AI is also really good at providing general knowledge to solve simple problems. For example, when I asked it how to reduce humidity in my room, it gave me over 7 suggestions. One of the tips was to improve ventilation by using a fan to bring in fresh air from outside through the window. And it worked!

Blogs, with the help of search engines, used to provide that information…

AI is good for quick answers, but it can’t replace blogs when we need reliable advice on real-world problems that requires more than just general knowledge. Blogs are often trustworthy because they come from experts and real experiences.

Like if I want to understand what it’s like to visit Lauterbrunnen — the stunning valley in Switzerland often called “heaven on earth” — and decide if it’s worth the trip, I’d prefer hearing from a real person who’s been there.

I don’t want an answer from a machine. AI doesn’t have feelings or dreams of beautiful places. So why would I ask AI if a place is worth visiting?

Thinking about getting a new travel bag? I’m careful before making a purchase.

Sure, AI can give me the bag’s dimensions, how many pockets it has, and its weight. But it can’t describe what using the bag is actually like. Blogs can.

The traveler who has blogged about his experience using the bag might even share tips that I could really appreciate, such as how the bag proves useful in specific situations. AI can’t provide that kind of personal experience.

As personal experience, emotion, and authenticity become more important to stand out from AI, I think more bloggers like me will focus on these things to attract readers. This could turn blogs today from just information sites back into what they used to be.

We might see a comeback of traditional blogging—a renaissance of the digital diary.

For those who aren’t familiar, traditional blogging, or hobby blogging, is all about sharing personal thoughts and building a community. It’s similar to YouTube but in text form.

From what I’ve seen over the years, traditional blogging mostly faded away with the rise of social media and search engine optimization (SEO).

I can’t say which of the two had a bigger impact on traditional blogging, but I’m sure it was SEO that made traditional blogs hard to find on search engine results pages (SERPs).

When people realized that SEO was a huge opportunity, everyone looking to make money online rushed to learn and use it. From niche site owners to businesses and brands, everyone started applying SEO to their websites to get more traffic and earn more.

I did too, because why not? There is nothing wrong with SEO—it’s about helping search engines show the best answers to people’s searches.

But truth to be told, I’ve wished so many times that I didn’t have to learn SEO. All I really want is to create content.

I left engineering to escape technical work, and now… SEO. It got even worse when Google introduced Core Web Vitals—I had to deal with code, CSS, JavaScript, and more again. It’s so frustrating.

As SEO became more popular, more pages optimized for search engines were published, pushing traditional blogs further down the search results.

Fewer and fewer people discover traditional blogs over time, making them less known to everyone, especially to younger generations. My Gen Z cousin doesn’t even know what a blog is. ‘You mean, vlogging?’ he replied when I asked him.

Unfortunately, scammers also learned how to use SEO and started using shady tactics to exploit it. When AI came along, it made things worse by allowing these scammers to create thousands of highly search-engine-optimized, low-quality posts, making search engines harder to use and hurting traditional blogs even more.

It’s a shame that traditional blogs, which are one of the best ways to express exact feelings and thoughts online, have been pushed into search engine oblivion by search engine optimized sites over the years.

Ironically, with AI, too, I can see traditional blogs making a comeback in search engines.

As search engines start using AI, they’ll get better at telling the difference between spam and real websites. They’ll also be better at understanding sites that aren’t optimized for search engines, like traditional blogs.

If search engine AI is trained and used properly, it will show more useful websites that match what people are looking for and fewer low-quality sites that only rely on SEO tricks. This means traditional blogs with great content might start appearing at the top of search results again.

Don’t get me wrong—Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or any search engine isn’t quite at the nearly-perfect level I’m talking about. From what I can see right now, they’re still far from perfect.

But I think at least one of them is moving in that direction and getting closer. I hate to admit it, but that’s Google.

It’s now showing more content that feels more personal and human. Along with forums, traditional blog posts are starting to appear more often in Google’s search results.

For example, when I was looking for a guide to Santiago de Compostela Cathedral in Spain, Google showed me a 2014 post from Pilgrimage Traveler, which is definitely one of those traditional blogs that are still around. It was ranked 3rd on Google when I found it, but it wasn’t even on the first page of other search engines.

Even though it’s a bit outdated, I enjoyed reading it more than the search engine optimized guides from big travel companies and niche sites. It felt like a friend was talking to me as I read.

The post was so insightful and filled with personal experience that I think it really deserved to be on the first page of Google’s search results.

Google might have UNFAIRLY decimated my old sites (and possibly thousands of other sites by legit small publishers) with their recent updates designed to show more human-like content. But after seeing these traditional blogs resurface on Google and comparing them to my blog posts, I understand why Google stopped sending traffic to my site.

Especially now that AI is getting better at providing basic information, I think it’s the human touch in our content that makes blog posts truly helpful…

(I’m not saying that all blogs affected by the updates aren’t helpful, but let’s be honest with ourselves.)

Earlier, though, I mentioned that Google is unfair and it truly is for many reasons.

For months, I wanted to share this with everyone and discuss it more. But after almost a year of seeing my blog’s traffic drop and trying everything to fix it, I realized it’s pointless. I’m just tired of stressing over flawed algorithms and things I can’t change. It’s time to focus on what works and move forward.

Nevertheless, Google’s decision was a real eye-opener for me. I realized that I should have written blog posts for a defined group of people, like a community, instead of focusing on search engines from the start.

I shouldn’t have relied on search engines to get readers… And I should have seen search engine traffic as just a bonus for the hard work I put into my writing.

Above all, writing without SEO feels so good. It’s great to write about what I want without stressing over things like links, site speed, or ranking issues. It’s sweet when my thoughts flow easily from my brain to my keyboard without worrying about how often I’ve used a keyword.

Moving forward, I’m focusing what I think what really matters in blogging now. It’s about helpfulness, authenticity, and human connection.

It’s time to standout among search engine optimized blog posts and cheap AI articles out there. It’s time to create content that people will be looking for in the age of AI.

With AI having a balanced impact on blogging (taking away readers from blogs and, at the same time, allowing more and more human content to surface), it’s now up to me to decide where I’d swing the needle.

The obvious answer is to use AI to my advantage. I need to minimize its threats and maximize the opportunities that AI provides.

Besides the obvious advantages of using AI for translation, grammar checking, and proofreading, I plan to use AI to make my articles sound even more human.

(1) For example, I’ll use AI to help me choose the right words to express my emotions and make my storytelling better by swapping boring words for more powerful ones.

This way, I can make sure my writing has a voice and personality.

(2) If I’m not very familiar with the audience I’m addressing, AI can be really helpful.

I can share my life experiences with AI and ask how this audience might relate to them. Based on its advice, I can create content or stories that are more relatable, which I believe could help me build new connections.

(3) Lastly, from my experience with AI, I’ve noticed that it only provides surface-level insights. So, to make my content more human, I’ll show a deeper understanding of the topic.

I’ll not only give definitions but also use analogies, metaphors, and emotional insights. AI will be my brainstorming partner, asking it for related and contrasting topics to help me compare and relate ideas.

By combining my personal experience with what I learn from AI, I can offer my readers different perspectives. I wonder if AI could ever do that on its own!