Daniel Stanica 🎯 #DigitalAssets !

@ifahimreza Check my study on SEO traffic collapse to understand why this is happening danielstanica.com/posts/Great-Bl… and here my presentation with the fixes: danielstanica.com/posts/great-se…

My two WordPress plugin sites have lost up to 60% of their Google traffic. New plugin sales are down almost 50%. Most of the traffic loss came from my documentation pages. My next 90 days: - Make both sites more AI-friendly. - Improve my sales funnel. - Stop relying only on Google. SEO takes time, so I'm giving YouTube a serious try. I'll share what works and what doesn't.

@domainsummitcom @Karakehayov @igrowyoung Indeed! Congrats to the seller!

@Karakehayov @igrowyoung @danielstanica10 :) your brand? :)

Massive sale :) Follow @igrowyoung for the mindset you need to build a domain empire.

@bengincet @YoungbloodJoe @bengincet I'm the author of the study. Of course, there are things I couldn't cover, and I mentioned that this is a cohort study; however, I would like to know, from your perspective, what is missing.

@YoungbloodJoe @danielstanica10 I don't think this is wrong, but I also don't think this is the full picture, as you correctly mentioned

Research on Blogging SEO: A cohort analysis by @danielstanica10 that looked at 100 blogs that claimed to make 6-figure annual incomes in 2022 via blogging and gaining traffic from Google found that in 2026: 👉 49% were "Wiped Out" (-80% or more in traffic) 👉 21% continued to grow (in organic traffic) 👉 11% were "Gutted" (-50% to -79%) 👉 7% "Declined" (less than a 50% drop) 👉 5% held flat 👉 4% were found to be dead or hacked 👉 2% Rebranded / changed the focus of the site Other stats Daniel presents on these sites: 👉 9% changed ownership 👉 20% of the blogs lost 99% or more of their traffic. 👉 12% are at a zero traffic level now 👉 Removing the 3 outlier sites that showed tremendous growth, in total the other 97% (97 total blogs) had combined losses of -63% Daniel argues of the 21% that continued to grow they all had a few things in common: 👉Firsthand experience - He calls this "irreplaceability" i.e. an AI cannot replace your content easily. 👉 Owned Audiences 👉 Real product - Site offers something real like a book, course, tool, or goods not just content. 👉 Branded Search Finally Daniel concludes that the 2 worst performing blog archetypes in his analysis were: 👉 "Course-and-coaching funnels" 👉 "Bolt an AI tool onto your blog" Urging readers to be deeply skeptical of these tactics. My takes: 1. I largely agree with Daniel's conclusions and they are things we have endorsed to clients since before the September 2023 HCU and subsequent updates began laying waste to indy publishers. 2. I disagree with his definition of an "Owned Audience". As I argue in my 2024 guide "How to Build an Owned Audience" we need to stop including social media channels as "Owned" and instead refer to them as "Rented" audiences: joeyoungblood.com/marketing/how-… 3. I wish Daniel had included more data points on the winners. It feels like he got to this part and was exhausted from writing a beast of a post and just gave us the answers. I want to see movement in the Ahrefs or SEMrush estimated traffic charts, correlations to Google updates, growth / loss / stagnation in PageRank, etc... of course doing this over 100 sites is going to take quite a bit of time. 4. What Daniel says largely lines up with the rocketship growth we're seeing out of HouseFresh right now and largely lines up with what we know they have said about their recovery turned into to-the-moon growth. They claim (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong again @ichbinGisele !) that they did not focus on SEO but instead focused on growing non-Google channels like YouTube (what Daniel refers to as an owned audience), saw growth in their branded searches according to Google Ads Keyword Planner, and most importantly their work is 100% based on first hand experience / testing that only they do at their lab - often using their own money to purchase devices and test them. The only check they would be missing from his scorecard is offering a real physical product, it seems HF is still very much reliant on affiliate income or donations to drive revenue. With that, the blueprint he provides to bloggers appears fairly sound when other SEO considerations are included such as technical SEO, avoiding spam, link building / PR development, and consensus building. I only highlighted a few data points and borrowed a graphic, there is a lot more detail on his blog and I recommend reading it here: danielstanica.com/posts/Great-Bl…

It just became official! 6 days out from The Great SEO Reset at Affiliate World Budapest. If you've watched your traffic flatten this year, and nothing you've tried has moved the needle, then this workshop is built for you. Two hours. One framework. The exact scorecard from my 100-blog study on why 85% of content sites collapsed and what the survivors actually have in common. If you're in Budapest on Wed, July 9, come sit in.

@SrLuka_ If you don't care about the website's long-term outcome, yeah, black hat is the way. Otherwise, you can literally destroy businesses built over years for short-term gains, only to face long-term troubles!

Good SEO is black hat Good marketers are black hat Never met a good marketer or SEO following platform rules

AI Search from Google hallucinated a football game result before it even started and has no problem admitting it. It confidently gave me a 1-1 final score for the Portugal vs. Croatia World Cup knockout match before the players even stepped onto the pitch. Further checking the Facebook page it was using as a source, I saw that it generates AI slup, which means Google AI search barely rates sources when it doesn't have enough data.

@georg_heinrich1 @CyrusShepard Licensed deals with big publishers, for instance, those with Reddit and Associated Press.

@CyrusShepard @danielstanica10 I wonder from whom the AI models will learn in the future...

SEO research of the week: The Great Blogging Collapse @danielstanica10 analyzed 100 blogs over 4 years + tracked the aftermath of Google's HCU and AI Overviews 85% lost Google traffic, 11 were gutted, but interestingly, a few actually grew. That's where the lesson is👏👏👏

More details & event tickets: affiliateworldconferences.com/europe/daniels…

Happy to announce that on 9 July, 2026, I will hold a 2h workshop at Affiliate World Budapest titled The Great SEO Reset: How to Thrive in the AI Visibility Era, focusing on the future of SEO and AI Visibility. Looking forward to seeing you there if you want to know more about: 🟢 The Traffic System that Broke - Why the rank-and-monetize model stopped working 🟢 The Content Website Collapse - 100 Blogs Study outlining why they lost 85% of the traffic 🟢 What Winners Have in Common - The 4 scorecard of websites that gain traffic when the most lost it 🟢 SEO vs. AI Visibility — What Actually Changed and What Remains the Same 🟢 The AI Visibility Framework — a practical scorecard for AI visibility readiness 🟢 Live Walkthrough / Self-Audit — attendees apply the framework to their own site/brand 🟢 Q&A + Takeaways 🟢 Link for event in comments

@NickLeRoy I did a study about that -- what happened to the once successful 100 blogs. You can check it here: danielstanica.com/posts/Great-Bl…

Was looking at performance for clients I haven't worked with in 3-4+ years, curious how they're doing. This is why you don't create Google (only) dependent businesses. I worked with this Australian price comparison marketplace back in 2021. They saw an increase in traffic to get crushed by AI and various quality-related updates.

@PeterNikolow @fabienr34 Thank you, Peter, for tagging me.

@fabienr34 cc: @danielstanica10

Le business model du “blog SEO + affiliation + AdSense” est-il officiellement mort ? Une étude a suivi 100 blogs considérés comme des success stories entre 2022 et 2026. Le verdict est brutal. 👇 📉 Le trafic SEO médian a chuté de… 85 %. Quelques chiffres marquants : • 55 blogs ont perdu plus de 80 % de leur trafic organique. • 20 ont perdu plus de 99 %. • 12 n’ont pratiquement plus aucun trafic Google. • Seuls 21 blogs sur 100 continuent réellement de croître. Pourquoi ? Parce que Google a profondément changé la donne avec : ➡️ Helpful Content Update ➡️ les Core Updates ➡️ EEAT (Experience) ➡️ les AI Overviews Les contenus facilement résumables sont devenus les plus vulnérables. Les niches les plus touchées : ❌ Finance ❌ Santé ❌ Business / Make Money Online ❌ Mode À l’inverse, les meilleurs survivants sont ceux où l’expérience est impossible à copier : ✅ Cuisine (recettes réellement testées) ✅ DIY / bricolage ✅ Crochet ✅ Certains blogs parentaux (Vrai retour de parents) ✅ Des voyages très spécialisés avec une véritable expertise terrain. Le point commun ? 👉 Montrer plutôt que décrire. Une recette cuisinée. Un projet bricolage réalisé. Un test complet. Des photos originales. Une vraie expérience. C’est beaucoup plus difficile à remplacer par une IA. Mais le vrai enseignement va encore plus loin. Le problème n’est pas uniquement Google. Même si vous êtes premier aujourd’hui, les AI Overviews et les LLM répondent de plus en plus directement aux internautes. Autrement dit : 👉 Le SEO devient un canal d’acquisition, plus un business model. Les survivants ont presque tous plusieurs atouts : • une marque reconnue • une audience propriétaire (newsletter, communauté…) • un produit ou un service • une vraie expertise terrain À mon sens, cela confirme une tendance que l’on observe depuis plusieurs années : Construire un site uniquement pour capter du trafic Google est devenu extrêmement risqué. Il faut désormais construire un véritable écosystème : ✅ SEO ✅ marque ✅ YouTube ✅ réseaux sociaux ✅ newsletter ✅ communauté ✅ produits Le SEO reste un formidable levier. Mais il ne peut plus être l’unique pilier d’un business. 👉 L’étude complète est particulièrement intéressante et mérite d’être lue, même si elle porte sur un échantillon de 100 blogs et ne représente pas l’ensemble du web. Elle illustre néanmoins très bien les transformations actuelles du Search. danielstanica.com/posts/Great-Bl…

@fabienr34 Merci pour cette synthèse, elle est très fidèle à l'esprit de l'étude. Tu as mis le doigt sur le point qui compte le plus : le SEO redevient un canal d'acquisition, et non plus un modèle de business à part entière.

@Rudy_dlt2 @fabienr34 Yes, it is. They are on the path to getting their SEO traffic decimated.

@fabienr34 J'ai vendu un site de voyage. Je faisais des trips sponsorisés, j'avais une audience de 30k personnes sur les réseaux sociaux, etc. Les gens qui l'ont repris ont juste publié des articles SEO full affiliation, sans exploiter la marque ou autre. Erreur stratégique.

@mainlymktg Indeed, borrowed platforms always carry a risk, but they can also provide large viewership. So it's a risk, but it comes with benefits. To limit the risk, I always tell people to try moving that audience to their owned channels. (emails, CRM, WSP groups, etc)

Even diversification seems somewhat risky if you're only choosing "borrowed" platforms. Thanks for sharing Joe's post about owned audiences. Though I'm still primarily an SEO and still think it is a great channel, building these owned audiences (X, email list etc) does seem like a safe long-term play.

Should you start or maintain a blog in 2026? Last week, I ran a study on 100 blogs and compared their total traffic and SEO traffic in 2022 and 2026. The results are shocking: 🟥 49% lost 80%+ of their traffic 🟥 21% continued to grow (in organic traffic) 🟥 11% lost traffic moderately (-50% to -79%) The 21% of blogs that continued to grow all had a few things in common: 🟢 Firsthand experience - I call it "irreplaceability," meaning that an AI can not summarize or reproduce your content easily 🟢 Owned & Other Rented Audiences - Email Newsletters, YouTube channel, etc 🟢 Real product - You offer something more than content: a tool, book, course, product or service 🟢 Branded Searches - Have a strong, established brand that people search for on Google So, to answer the question of whether you should start a blog in 2026, I would say you should do it only if you can produce high-quality, firsthand experience content that cannot be summarized by AI. Also, don't treat SEO traffic as the main source of traffic; treat it as one channel in your traffic mix. The link to the full study and data: danielstanica.com/posts/Great-Bl…

@Capitaine Merci, Olivier. J'ai hâte de lire l'article. Si vous souhaitez plus de détails sur la recherche, n'hésitez pas à me le faire savoir et je me ferai un plaisir de vous les fournir.

Ça m'a l'air d'être une bombe, cette étude ! Je vous en reparle très bientôt sur oliviersauvage.com

@mainlymktg Thank you, @mainlymktg, for reviewing it. I appreciate it. Indeed, traffic diversification is key to a sustainable digital business nowadays; otherwise, relying solely on SEO arbitrage is high-risk, and my study proves it.

Saw this reposted from Cyrus and just wanted to say it was a great article. Interesting data, great graphics, and thoughtful analysis. Thanks for putting it together! The point on diversification is definitely key, reliance on something that subject to change and largely out of your control is high-risk.

@dom_gag_96 Disagree. Italians founders I met barely know or want to speak English

People keep asking me why Italy. Because the talent is world-class and the cost of living is half of SF. Because nobody is looking here, which means less competition for the best people. Because when you tell an Italian founder the odds are against them, they work harder. Italy is the most undervalued startup market in Europe right now.

For me, an owned audience is one you can reach regardless of any changes to company algorithms: membership on your website, email newsletter, social media (WSP/TG channel), etc. Even people who know your brand URL and type it in the browser count as owned audience. YouTube channel and social media followers are rented audiences, and if the algorithm changes, you will reach fewer members. Also, if you get deplatformed, you will lose the way to contact them.

@YoungbloodJoe @danielstanica10 great insights, the focus on irreplaceable expertise really shows why those blogs held steady. how do you decide which audience channels count as owned?

Thank you, @YoungbloodJoe, for taking the time to read the study. 2. Totally agree with Rented vs Owned audience and YouTube, along with Social Media, fell in the 1st category. I've made the change in the article to outline this, and also linked your guide on how to build an owned audience 3. Also agree regarding looking at winners in detail, but as this has to be done granularly on each website, it's the scope of a new article.