As mentioned in the header, let’s have a talk related to the end of the blogging era. I believe that blogging is “dead” already. This doesn’t mean blogging is completely gone, nope.
It still exists, but you don’t need it. In an extreme way, we are the ones who killed blogging.
There are two major reasons: the growth of AI and visual media.
Why People Used to Blog
There used to be plenty of reasons to start a blog. People did it to build a personal brand, to fill their free time, or to create a portfolio for their business. But let’s be honest—the absolute number one reason for most bloggers was to make money through Google AdSense.
Yes, money.
When money entered the equation, everyone tried their best to master Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can easily find a tutorial in a forum, with the keyword: WordPress SEO Optimization, and you would get people starting to sell their plugins and paid tricks that were actually already available on the website.
The goal is super clear: they do their best so they can catch users’ attention to visit their websites. They built websites with their unique look and identity. Of course, not everyone put in the work—plenty of sites were just lazy copy-and-paste jobs. But a lot of people worked incredibly hard. They wrote detailed tutorials, created niche guides, or built independent news portals.
I was a sysadmin before and assisted a customer to build a strong website on a dedicated server, not VPS. He paid a lot and I got approximately $60 (it was big in Indonesia) for doing “nothing”.
They did absolutely everything they could to catch the user’s attention. And for a long time, it actually worked.
How AI Changed Our Approach
I want to share a new system with you called: Zero Click. And I believe you are also doing it right now. Zero click is a new way for us to navigate the internet—no longer searching, but directly opening an AI and starting to chat with its chatbot. Magic happens, and you get everything you want.
On point, no search, no ads (at least for now).
Let me help you elaborate further:
The Old Way: Whenever we needed to know something, we would open Google and type a query. “How to do X,” “How to achieve Y,” or “Step-by-step tutorial for Z.” We would click through three or four different blogs, compare the info, and if a website was truly helpful, we’d bookmark it so we could find it again later.
The New Way: Today, we don’t need to browse the open web. Most of us just rely on two or three apps: Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude.
These AI assistants already have everything. Every tutorial, coding fix, cooking recipe, and historical fact is pre-packaged right inside their chat windows. You don’t have to scroll through walls of introductory text, dodge pop-up ads, or reject cookie banners just to get a simple answer.
Because AI gives us everything instantly, there’s almost no reason to visit a traditional website anymore. The incentive to click a link is gone.
The Reality Check: The AdSense Collapse
If you think this shift is just a theory, the financial data proves it’s an existential crisis for creators.
With the rollout of features like Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode—which synthesize web pages and give answers directly on the search page—traditional organic web traffic has fallen off a cliff.
- The Traffic Drop: Data from recent industry studies shows that when an AI Overview appears on a Google search, click-through rates to actual websites plummet by over 50%. Instead of a healthy 15% of users clicking on the top links, that number drops to a mere 8%. Some informational and tutorial blogs have reported total traffic losses between 20% and 60%.
- The Revenue Crash: This lack of traffic has starved the Google AdSense ecosystem. While Google’s own ad revenue is growing (because they now show ads next to their AI answers), independent publishers using AdSense have been devastated. Industry reports show that multi-diversified media brands have seen overall revenue drops of 30% to 67%. Even worse, a massive Google ad infrastructure glitch combined with AI rollout pressures caused many smaller, AdSense-dependent blogs to experience a catastrophic 70% to 95% overnight collapse in earnings.
When OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google crawl a website, the ratio of “bot visits” to “actual human clicks sent back to the creator” is staggering. For instance, Anthropic’s crawler takes data thousands of times for every single user it actually redirects to a publisher’s link.
Conclusion
The conclusion is clear, for me: blogging is dead. There’s no point in creating a tutorial or whatever to attract users—they feel AI is more useful. With all of these changes, I never expect to create articles to generate passive income.
If you are one of those who still think blogging can generate revenue, my best recommendation is to move on. Try something that can generate money for you rather than relying on blogging.