I’m rethinking blogging

Hello! 👋

This started off as a quick post about why I'm moving my newsletter back to my blog and ended up turning into a full article of my thoughts on the value of blogging today.

In 14 years of writing my newsletter, it has gone through a lot of changes. I want to share my thoughts on why producing blog content is valuable again, but for much different reasons than before!

For the last few years, newsletter has lived in my community, The Search Bar.

You can read legacy episodes of the newsletter here.

The new newsletter lives here in the "Newsletter" category of my blog. The first episode of this new season will be out tomorrow.

I moved the newsletter off of my blog for a few reasons. The main one was that Google just didn't like it. There really wasn't a reason to have it indexed in Search. I think it was because for a while, newsletter was simply summarizing the content on the web and didn't have significant original value on its own. I mean, it had value to people getting it in their inbox, but it wasn't the kind of thing that people would want to land on from Search rather than reading the articles it was summarizing.

I think my new blog posts do have original value though. Especially when we think about how search changes as it becomes agentic.

Does it make sense to have a blog today?

Yes, but for different reasons than before. I believe agents will make blogging exciting again.

This week, 3 of my clients asked me to brainstorm with them on the effectiveness of their blog. Is it still worthwhile to blog in this age of Search?

For many years a blog served a few purposes:

1. Having a body of knowledge on a topic showed your topical authority. I do think this is true today. But I also think that for a lot of companies, you already have that authority. If you are known as a place to buy green widgets, writing more blog content on green widgets is not likely to boost your topical authority. If you're brand new in your space, blog content might help you get known, but only if you can write blog posts that are adding new information to the body of knowledge in your space - no easy task.
2. A blog can attract links. Again, true today, but most of the blog content I see today is not something people are linking to unless it's new, helpful info like a study for example.
3. A blog can attract customers, leads and newsletter subscribers. This is what I was investigating for my clients. I did some work with Claude and later, Antigravity, to help me dig around GA4 and determine if people who were landing on the blog were leading to conversions or something meaningful for the business. For all three clients the answer was essentially no. We were spending a lot of time and money producing content that wasn't driving meaningful change in the business. In one case we found that a certain type of blog content was indeed driving some sales. But for most, the blog content was providing an informational need that now was well covered by AI Overviews or AI Mode.

Today, almost every kind of informational topic is covered quite well by AI Overviews. There is much less incentive to blog. Some of my clients have suggested there is perhaps branding value in appearing in the AIOs. I do think they have a point. I also think that in some cases people are clicking through from the AIOs. But nowhere near as many as in the past.

I think, however, there is another reason to blog. This revelation changed my thinking and made me realize that the content I'm creating today for my newsletter really should live in a place that Google can easily crawl and present to searchers - on my website rather than in my community. (My community runs on Mighty Networks which is great for a community but has severe limitations when it comes to SEO.)

Your blog will be valuable if it is useful to agents

As search turns agentic, our main purpose will not be to provide information to the world, but to provide functionality for agents - keeping in mind that those agents are helping real humans accomplish things.

I just got access to Gemini in Chrome and I find it so useful. I find myself opening the sidebar all day long and asking Gemini to do things with the information I can get from websites. I can only imagine how much more useful this will be when two things happen:

1. Gemini will be able to perform actions and use tools.
2. Websites have WebMCP (a simple tool that gives AI agents the ability to use the functionality of your website.)

Both of these are coming.

I think that today, there are 3 reasons to blog. The first is if you are an authoritative source that people truly turn to to learn new things on your topic. For example, people still read Search Engine Roundtable, SEL or SEJ to learn what's happening in SEO. Next, your blog is important if you can provide original data such as a new study or insight that isn't currently known to the world. But most importantly, your blog is important if you can provide people with information that allows them to accomplish things.

Some examples of helpful blogging

Let me share some examples of the type of content that helps people accomplish things.

1. Tutorials. Let's say you figured out how to do something cool by connecting the Ahrefs or Semrush MCP with Claude or Antigravity. If you create a tutorial, I can tell my agent (in most cases, Gemini in Chrome, but could also be Claude, etc.) "Take the information in this article and replicate the process for me.
2. Templates and processes. I could publish a blog post on how I approach analyzing a traffic drop. You could then ask your agent to adapt my process to your situation.
3. Inspiration. A blog post on how you decorated your living room, or new art you created or a craft project you made could serve as inspiration for my agent to help me create something similar.
4. Truly original ideas. I am hoping that this is what you are reading now...a blog post that helps you think on a topic in a different way. Readers can then ask their agents to help them brainstorm on incorporating those ideas into their workflows.
5. Sharing your experience in a way that helps people make decisions. I think that high quality first hand reviews of products, restaurants, etc. will be even more valuable as people will place great value on the experience of humans. Your original blogging might be used by agents to help people make buying decisions.

I think that new ways to use the content from web pages will emerge as well. We are entering a new era where we will see all sorts of creativity!

The point I'm trying to make is that blog content will be valuable if it truly helps people not just learn something, but accomplish something or do things differently.

With that in mind, I'm happy to present my new style of newsletter in my next blog post (out tomorrow.) Instead of just curating the news for you, I thought deeply on how I could write from a place of experience. I asked Gemini to look across my last two weeks of client calls and Search Bar meetings and pull out the actionable things we discussed. If I discussed it in a client call, then it's something others would want to know! I wrote about those and ended with some ideas on how you can use your agents alongside my blog post to accomplish things.

Speaking of which, here's an idea for you. You can open up Gemini in the Chrome sidebar right now  (you should see an "Ask Gemini" button at the top right of Chrome) and ask this, "Based on Marie's blog post and what you know of me, what are 10 ideas for topics I could blog on?" You could also try having your blog open in another tab in the Gemini conversation so Gemini has more insight to draw from.

Hope you enjoy the new newsletter! Stay tuned here tomorrow or better yet, sign up below and I'll send it to you by email.

Marie

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