It’s my birthday today. Somewhere Nick Cave has an old band named after the occasion — mine’s the quieter sort, cake and candles, no bats released. And you know the rule — the one whose birthday it is doesn’t get the fuss, they’re the one who has to bring the cakes in for everyone else. I work on my own, so there’s no office and no colleagues to carry a tin round to — which rather makes you lot my office. So here’s my cake, brought to your inbox instead. Except I can’t take the credit for the baking: someone else made it, and I just couldn’t wait to bring it round.
The baker is Daniel Stanica. He took 100 blogs that were genuine success stories back in 2022 — real businesses, some of them earning six and seven figures — and measured what happened to their Google traffic by 2026. The whole thing is on his site, all hundred laid out, and it’s worth your time: The Great Blogging Collapse.
His findings are brutal. The typical blog lost eighty-five per cent of its search traffic. Two-thirds lost more than half. Only twenty-one of the hundred were still growing. Twelve had gone to zero.
Daniel’s diagnosis is the part worth reading twice. These businesses had made, in his words, “a single, large, leveraged bet that Google would be the middleman, sending free clicks indefinitely.” The whole thing stood on one channel. Then Google changed what it rewarded, AI Overviews began answering questions before anyone clicked, and the free clicks dried up. There was nothing underneath.
The ones that survived had a single thing in common, and he puts it better than I could: “the niches that survived are the ones where the content is the doing.” Real experience a machine can’t fake, an audience they actually owned, a name people searched for on purpose. His verdict on the old way is blunt: the model is “dead. Not dying but dead.”
Now — you run a business, not a blog, and it’s my birthday, so why am I bringing you someone else’s cake and calling it a warning?
Because it isn’t really about blogs. It’s about the bet. Every one of those hundred businesses assumed the customers would keep arriving from one place they didn’t own. That’s not a blogging problem — it’s the position half the small businesses I speak to are in without quite realising it. All the enquiries coming through Google, on a site rented from a platform, with no list, no direct audience, no second door.
These were real businesses that rented their entire customer supply from one company — and one morning the company stopped delivering. If that sounds nothing like you, go and check where your last ten customers actually came from.
What Daniel says replaces the old model is, near enough, the thing I try to build for everyone I work with: make something nobody else can credibly make, put it on ground you own, and become a name people look for on purpose. Grand words — but it comes down to a few plain things I’d want to know if it were your business and we were sharing this slice. First, whether you own the ground your site stands on or you’re renting it from a platform that can change the rules on you overnight — which is all an Astro website really means. Then whether anyone can find you when Google decides not to show you that day, or that’s your only way in — the whole case for local citations. And the quiet one: when someone does land, does the site turn them into a customer, or just count them and wave them off? That’s the difference between visitors and enquiries.
So that’s my birthday round — a slice of someone else’s brilliant work, handed over with the one thing I’d want a friend to know before it ever costs them. Better than any amount of fuss, if you ask me.
Tony Cooper
We Build Stores
tony.cooper@webuildstores.co.uk
07963 242210
If I’ve ever done right by your business, a quick Google review would mean a great deal — it helps other small businesses find me. Only if it’s earned: leave one here.
P.S. It’s my birthday, so here’s my one request — not of my clients, of you. This week, pull up your last ten customers and see where each one actually came from. If nearly all of them arrive one way, and that way is a platform you don’t own, that’s the thing to shore up before you ever need to. Reply and tell me what you find — no charge, no pitch. Call it your slice. And now — I’m blowing out the candles.
