85% Traffic Loss Due To AI

This week is one of those weeks where I take advantage of the benefits of running my own business. I will be traveling up to Maine with the family later this morning and will be gone all week.

Now, as usual, I will be connected. And I will be working some, but certainly not my usual full-time load. So, for clients, just realize some things will be on pause until next week. If I can handle things remotely from the laptop, I certainly will. Obviously, in my line of work, I never fully disappear. 😇

But, trying not to skip a beat on this weekly newsletter! So, let’s do this thing before I pile out of here and catch a plane. ✈️

Why Some Blogs Are Losing 85% of Their Traffic (And Others Aren’t) 

Saw a post recently that was interesting – and goes right to the heart of how blogging has changed so much in the age of AI. Neil Patel dropped a stat… a study tracked 100 once-successful blogs, and the median one lost 85% of its Google traffic.

That’s not a “should be fine” number. That’s a “your business plan just changed” number.

But here’s the part that actually matters: it wasn’t every blog. Some are still growing. And the difference wasn’t luck.

The blogs getting wrecked are still cranking out the same stuff… “best budgeting apps,” “how to start a podcast,” “top tools in 2026.” The roundup. The listicle. The thing you could write in your sleep because you’ve read ten other posts just like it. That kind of thing just doesn’t pull the same punch as it used to.

The blogs still growing? They stopped summarizing and started proving something. They built the thing. Tested it. Spent the money. Made the mistake. Told people what actually happened. It is content based in REAL EXPERIENCE.

Real human experience and judgement cannot be duplicated by AI. It never will be, either.

So, here’s the question that needs to be asked about everything you produce today…

Can AI answer this without me?

If yes… don’t bother. You’re spending hours producing something ChatGPT already does faster. AI can churn out listicles and generic content all day. In the time it would take you to write one, another person churns out 40 similar ones in a single day using AI.

You need to be thinking about proof. Your actual experience, your specific numbers, the client story, the mistake you made last Tuesday. AI can quote that, but it can’t create it. You have to go do the thing first.

And when you’re actually doing what you’re talking about, that means you can also show it on video. That experience of YOU sitting there on camera talking about your experience and SHOWING what you’re doing…. cannot be duplicated by AI.

Also, actual relationships. This one might be the biggest of the three, and it’s easy to overlook because it doesn’t feel like “content” at all. But building your business around real, individual people… knowing your clients, remembering their situation, responding like a human instead of a funnel… that’s the one thing AI has never been able to fake convincingly. People don’t stick around because you published consistently. They stick around because they feel like you actually know them.

Talking to people. Responding like a normal person. Showing your personality. These are all things that will always remain evergreen in the age of AI.

In the end, AI is just making us all do what we should have been doing all along. Creating content that is hard to duplicate.

Articles written purely to fill the calendar or to push a keyword phrase…. those things are just noise now. It worked before, but not anymore. AI can churn that trash out all day long. There’s no competitive edge there any longer.

One other thing about your content in the age of AI, but…

Answer direct questions.

So many people are searching AI tools rather than regular Google searches today. They’re asking AI questions. AI is then going out and looking for those answers. So, if you want to have a site which is AI-optimized, focus on answering real questions.

You know the funny thing? None of this is new. It has always worked. It is just now, with AI, it means it is really the entire content strategy today.

WordPress News & Updates

FluentPlayer Just Leveled Up. WPManageNinja shipped 1.3.0, and it’s a big one… native Elementor and Divi support, audio playback for podcasts and course content, private media so your paid videos stay off Google, and FluentCRM engagement tracking baked right in. If you’re running courses or gated video, this is worth a look.

FluentCommunity Gets Audio Posts. Version 2.7.5 lets your members drop audio straight into the feed… podcast clips, voice notes, whatever. Also picked up a collapsible “Details” block and an actual LaTeX math block for course content, plus proper dark mode. Nice little update if you’re running a community.

Independent Analytics Rebuilt Its Real-Time Report. Version 2.15.0 gives you a live chart of views, clicks, form submissions and orders, with the ability to regroup by city or UTM data and click any item to filter. I use Independent Analytics myself, so this one’s a genuine worth-the-update for me.

Is WordPress.org’s “Popular” Themes List Rigged? An investigation turned up some seriously suspicious install-velocity patterns and shared analytics scripts across a cluster of theme sites, all clustered near the top of the popular list. Worth a read if you’ve ever wondered how “popular” some of those themes really got there.

The Plugin Install Boom May Be Over. Jean Galea crunched seven years of data and found plugin installs have basically flatlined around 5.5 million a day instead of climbing like they used to. Take it as one more sign the “easy growth” era of WordPress is behind us… see his numbers here.

An Elementor Widget Showed Up Uninvited. Some users are reporting a promotional widget, complete with what look like affiliate links, appearing on their sites without them ever adding it. Here’s the thread if you want to see what people are saying… and maybe go check your own site.

Novamira Adds Free AI Design Generation. Version 1.10.0 lets you generate a full site design, either building on what’s already there or starting from scratch, and it works across builders and themes as long as you’re connected through their AI client. See how it works.

FluentCart Can Now Sell External Products. Gaurav Tiwari’s GT Extensions added support for listing a product in FluentCart’s catalog while routing the actual purchase off to a third-party site… handy if you’re promoting an affiliate product or an outside tool alongside your own. Details here.

Giving Your AI a Memory… Using WordPress

Ever notice how AI forgets everything the second you switch tools? Ask ChatGPT something today, ask Claude the same thing tomorrow, and you’re starting from zero both times. No memory of your business, your clients, your decisions… none of it carries over.

This can be especially an issue if you use multiple AI tools. For instance, you set up something in ChatGPT only to switch over to Claude and it has no idea.

I have kinda solved this using a local folder of files (I call it my AIOS, or AI Operating System) as well as an Obsidian vault. But, here’s something interesting….

Could WordPress itself be the memory layer for your AI?

Came across a post making a case I hadn’t considered, but it immediately clicked: WordPress might be one of the best places to actually fix AI memory.

Here’s the basic idea. AI “memory” isn’t some exotic thing. It’s really just notes… a title, a quick summary, a little detail about what happened and why. WordPress has been managing exactly that kind of content for two decades. It already has a place to store things, a simple screen to edit them, and accounts and permissions to control who sees what.

So instead of AI memory living inside some app’s private database, somewhere you can’t see it, it lives on your own WordPress site… as actual posts. Organized, tagged, searchable, just like the rest of your content.

The person behind that post asked their AI assistant to save something it had just learned. A second later, that memory showed up as a real page, sitting right there in their WordPress admin. Editable. Deletable. Just like any other post on the site.

That’s the whole appeal. It’s not a black box. It’s not locked inside somebody else’s AI subscription, disappearing the day you cancel it or they change the rules. It’s yours. You can open it, read it, fix it if it’s wrong. As a fan of digital sovereignty, that tickles me in all the right places. 😜

Funny enough, I already run something like this for myself… just not in WordPress. My own AI keeps notes on my business, my clients, and my preferences, sorted into a few simple categories. Reading that post, it hit me that WordPress could do the exact same job for anybody, using the AI-connector plugins that are already showing up everywhere in the WordPress world. There are all kinds of ways to make AI talk with WordPress these days.

Now, the honest caveat: having a place to store memories doesn’t mean your AI will actually use it well. Remembering to check it, remembering to update it… that’s still on you, at least for now. And this whole approach is still early. Nobody’s shipped a polished, one-click plugin for it yet.

But I have a feeling that’s coming. Keep an eye out. I wouldn’t be surprised to see “AI memory” become its own little category of WordPress plugin before the year’s out. A good packaged AI skill on how to use it… and a plugin that sets up the perfect structure for memories to be managed in WordPress.

See, WordPress isn’t just about public websites. In the end, it is about content management. And there are lots of places where that’s relevant.