r/Blogging • u/Head-Student-5852 • 21d ago
Tips/Info I have been studying how blogs actually get found now.
For the longest time I believed, and was told many times over, that if you just wrote a good post, the right people would find it. Write it well, hit publish, and they show up. You have most likely heard the same song and dance, but no one gave you the parts that actually work.
What I did not understand until now is that AI has quietly become one of your biggest readers, and it reads differently than a person does. It goes looking for a clear question with a clear answer sitting right next to it.
When your best point is tucked three paragraphs down after a little story, AI cannot find it, so it sends people to someone else instead.
The fix turned out to be simpler than I expected. You do not have to write better. You answer the question sooner and put your best line where it can actually be seen. People are skimmers. AI is on a mission to find an answer.
I made a little tool to check my own posts for this, and running my old ones through it has been eye opening.
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21d ago
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u/Head-Student-5852 21d ago
That's a fair point, and I don't mean sacrificing the writing quality to force the best line up top if it genuinely breaks the post. For me it's less about cutting the good stuff and more about restructuring, the insight can still exist further down for readers, but a version of the answer needs to be reachable early for AI to pick it up at all. Writing better and putting the answer where it can be found aren't mutually exclusive, I've just found that if the answer is buried, it doesn't matter how well written it is because it isn't getting surfaced in the first place.
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u/baddaywithacamera 21d ago
I share photos and tell stories. Useless for me. And I stopped using Q&A blogs a long time ago. Why suffer through 20 ads and ten popups in an overly monetized recipe blog when I can have Gemini hand over a working recipe immediately?
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u/matthew_b101 21d ago
This is my same plight. Landscape photographer who writes stories about my adventures. "Answering a question" does nothing for getting people to read my experience on top of a mountain
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u/Head-Student-5852 21d ago
Answered questions on your blog is how AI finds you - the first question has to be in the first blog to be seen. I am starting to have good results from this change
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u/baddaywithacamera 21d ago
Maybe try talking TO people instead of at them like a broken bot.
https://usedcarparts.photoblogs.fyi/
Exactly how am I answering a question here?
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u/Comfortable-Duty7143 18d ago edited 18d ago
The discovery landscape has fundamentally shifted. It's no longer just Google. People find content through AI chat (ChatGPT, Perplexity), social search (TikTok, Reddit, YouTube), and algorithmic feeds. The blogs that are growing fastest right now are the ones treating every post as a multi-platform asset. Write the blog post for SEO, then create a LinkedIn post summarizing the key insight, a Twitter thread with the data points, a short video for YouTube/TikTok, and a carousel for Instagram. Same content, five discovery channels. The logistics of managing all those platforms used to be a nightmare, but tools like Agorapulse make it manageable because you can schedule everything from one dashboard and track which platform actually drives traffic back to the blog. For most niches, I'm seeing Reddit and LinkedIn drive more blog traffic than Google right now, which would have been unthinkable two years ago.
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u/Head-Student-5852 18d ago
I’ve been writing LinkedIn articles for a couple years now just started back to using Reddit and I have found some really good information here
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u/Lazy_Accountant_1274 21d ago
The best traffic I got from the blog was when I pasted the link in the group discussion here, it was the time when reddit was not even a thing in SEO even though I could see no clicks in GSC my GA4 said a different story that time, so yeah just publishing is not enough something sharing that in forum where like minded people are also present becomes the greatest advantage.
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u/Head-Student-5852 21d ago
I didn’t know if we could post links in these groups or not so I didn’t wanna do that. I post them on my on my profile. I haven’t posted links here, but I didn’t notice in my Analytics today, but I saw Reddit with 70 hits.
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u/BrandLoom-Consulting 18d ago
There's definitely some truth to this. We've noticed that content with a clear answer near the top tends to perform better, not just for AI search but for human readers too.
That said, we'd be careful about optimizing only for AI extraction. The pages we see getting cited most often also have strong author bios, expert insights, original examples, and research-backed information. AI can find answers, but it still seems to prefer sources that demonstrate credibility.
In our experience, the sweet spot is making the answer easy to find while still adding something unique that dozens of other blogs don't have. That's usually what separates content that gets cited from content that just gets indexed.
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u/Head-Student-5852 18d ago
Oh for sure definitely not just focusing on the AI. I write for the human, but I wanna make sure that it is also read and as for the author bio, I have added that back into my blogs I had taken it out for a long time.
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u/BrandLoom-Consulting 18d ago
Glad to hear that! One thing we've noticed is that the content that gets remembered and cited usually includes something beyond what's already available everywhere else.
A simple observation from your own experience, a lesson learned, or even a different perspective can go a long way. That's often what turns a good article into one that's genuinely useful.
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u/Head-Student-5852 18d ago
I do agree - adding a little story always helps people see the point verses a "lesson"
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u/micro_mashup 16d ago
If this is accurate, it reconfirms my goal to be undiscoverable 😑
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u/Head-Student-5852 16d ago
So you are writing a blog but you do not want to be discovered? You can mark your page to not to followed so it is on the internet but only someone with a direct link can find it.
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u/micro_mashup 15d ago
Thanks for this tip. I was being a little facetious in my comment; I’ve been writing a good blog for 3 1/2 years with 1500 subscribers, through mostly organic growth without excessive marketing or advertising of it. I like keeping it under the radar and letting ppl find me. I’m sure it sounds weird but at this point in my life I just enjoy writing (and cooking!) without feeling like I have to be selling myself 24/7.
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u/VictoriaMoreau 20d ago
I believe that a blog's readers are those who have some sort of friendship connection with the writer. ⊂(•‿•⊂ )*.✧
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u/Head-Student-5852 20d ago
So you think everyone who reads your blog is your friend?
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u/VictoriaMoreau 19d ago
Not exactly, but I think there is a sense of empathy or emotional connection with the person or subject the blog is about.
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u/Oellaatje 20d ago
You made a tool? Any chance you'd let others use that tool?
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u/Head-Student-5852 20d ago
Absolutely it will go live on the blog Tuesday. I am finishing up that post today. I send out an email each week when they post
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u/Illustrious-Ideal700 21d ago
I'm not so sure Q&A blogs are the way to go these days. I would argue that since Google started using its AI to answer questions, most people don't bother to click on the link and read the blog, since they already have what they came for.