Should You Start a Blog in 2025? Here’s the Honest Tea
Blogging in 2025 is harder than ever, with Google’s algorithms, AI scraping content, and spammy competitors making success difficult. Diversify traffic sources and focus on building a loyal community to thrive.
Google now favors AI-generated answers and blackhat SEO tactics, leaving original bloggers struggling for visibility. Success requires patience, creativity, and connecting directly with your audience.
While blogging is no longer an easy win, it’s still worth it if you love creating, building connections, and playing the long game. Adjust expectations and explore new strategies to grow.
If you’re thinking about starting a blog in 2025, here’s the harsh reality: Google owns the playground—and they’re making the rules harder than ever. Forget about the days when producing high-quality content was enough to climb the ranks. Today, Google’s focus seems to have shifted away from rewarding legitimate creators to favoring spammy tactics and AI-generated content, leaving many bloggers feeling frustrated and defeated.
“It feels like Google doesn’t even care about whitehat blogs anymore. They reward spammy sites with garbage content, and legit creators get left in the dust,” said Maya, 29, a travel blogger who’s been struggling to recover from the infamous 2022 May Core Update.
Numerous studies indicate that the shift to AI search features and the use of AI chatbots are killing traffic to publishers’ sites. But Google on Wednesday denied that’s the case, at least in aggregate. Instead, the search giant says that total organic click volume from its search engine to websites has been “relatively stable” year-over-year and that average click quality has slightly increased.
“This data is in contrast to third-party reports that inaccurately suggest dramatic declines in aggregate traffic — often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that occurred prior to the roll out of AI features in Search,” writes Google VP and Head of Search, Liz Reid, in a new blog post.
Though Google hasn’t shared any specific data to back up its conclusions, even if we assume Google’s claims to be true, this doesn’t necessarily mean that AI isn’t having an impact.
Even Google has to admit this, as Reid acknowledges that “user trends are shifting traffic to different sites, resulting in decreased traffic to some sites and increased traffic to others.”
That word “some” is doing heavy lifting here, as Google doesn’t share data about how many sites are gaining or losing. And while chatbots like ChatGPT have certainly seen traffic increase in recent months, that doesn’t mean online publishers aren’t suffering.
Google’s search results are littered with blackhat SEO sites that game the system. These sites copy original content, exploit loopholes, and somehow end up outranking the hardworking creators who actually produce it.
Distracting Elements: Google isn’t just a search engine anymore—it’s an answer engine. The People Also Ask (PAA) section, Videos Panel, and AI-generated overviews take up prime real estate at the top of the search results. This leaves fewer opportunities for blogs to get organic clicks.
Shuffling Traffic: Bloggers describe Google’s traffic flow as completely unpredictable. “One week you’re up, the next week you’re tanking. It’s like an endless cycle of hope and disappointment,” said Jamie, 35, who runs a parenting blog. “I worked hard to recover after the 2022 May Core Update. I thought I was finally seeing progress, but last month, all my traffic tanked again. It’s beyond frustrating.”
In 2025, thriving as a blogger means navigating a system where the rules feel stacked against you—and Google isn’t exactly making it easier to play fair.
Over many years, the company has tried to come up with compelling features for both consumers and retailers that would attract more users to Google Shopping. These efforts have included universal shopping carts, local inventory checks, deal finders, shopping from product images on websites, and more. It even made its Shopping listings free for merchants in 2020.
Meanwhile, as users complained that Google Search quality was declining, the search giant was seeing so much demand for Reddit that it finally added a “Reddit” filter to allow users to narrow down results on relevant search queries. (Now that filter simply reads, “forums.”)
So perhaps there’s some truth in Google’s denials — it’s not AI that’s entirely responsible for killing search. Search was already dying.
Google’s new blog post also attempts to move the goal posts a bit about what it means for websites receiving Google’s clicks. Now, instead of counting clicks, it wants publishers to think about click quality.
The company says average click quality has increased, and Google is sending “slightly more quality clicks” to websites than a year ago. (Google explains that a quality click is one where users don’t quickly click back — they stay and read.) How much of an increase, though, Google doesn’t say. The company only points out that when people click through on an AI response to the source, they’re more likely to dive deeper, so those clicks are more valuable.
Google is considered a leader in ad lead generation for several reasons:
High Traffic: With over 3.5 billion searches daily, Google Ads effectively attracts users actively searching for products or services. 1
Immediate Impact: Google Ads provides quick results, making it a standout choice for small businesses looking for immediate results. 1
Investment vs. Expense: It offers a return on investment rather than just an expense, which can be attractive for businesses. 1
