On still blogging in 2026

I realised recently that I’ve been writing a blog for over 20 years now. Those two decades have not softened my reflexive dislike of the word blog, by the way. I mentally hesitate before ever using it. I will suck it up and use it here, because at the beginning of a new year, I wanted to reflect a little on my writing and its place on the internet.

We’re a couple of years off this particular website’s 20 year anniversary, but I started its predecessor while I was at university. I was a journalism student at the time, and it was writing for the internet that captured my imagination rather than the newspapers that I had expected to work for when I started. There was a freedom and immediacy to writing directly for an audience, rather than for an editor, a publication and a set of commercial imperatives. That’s where my writing energies have gone ever since, and if we were to look at wordcounts, the books are a minor detour.

Writing for the internet is not what it was however. At the start it was quite relational – traffic came from other websites, as writers referred to each other and recommended each other’s work. Social media amplified that enormously as readers became active participants too, and the reach of my articles expanded. Blogs were recognised as a legitimate medium, rightly or wrongly, and being a blogger was respectable enough to get invites for radio and television. It was significant enough to have its own industry awards, and this website was twice named the best green blog in the UK, by two different agencies.

Neither of those awards ceremonies exist today, which reflects the changing fortunes of the blog. Social media was the big driver in its decline, with long-form online articles giving way to the kind of short, snappy and personal takes that do well on Facebook. Twitter made them shorter, Instagram made them visual and then TikTok made them move.

The social media giants soon recognised that people posting links to external content took eyeballs off their platform and its associated advertising revenues. Over time they all rewrote their algorithms to boost ‘native content’ and downgrade links to external articles and blogs. Twitter was the last to go, and in 2023 under Elon’s reign of chaos, my traffic from the platform practically disappeared. The experience is far from unique. Higher profile bloggers than me found their audiences cratering by as much as 90%, and they started writing on Substack or recording podcasts instead.

Now there’s another threat facing purveyors of longform writing on the internet. Looking at the traffic sources for last year, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity all feature in the list of top referrers. My articles have always turned up on search engines and that’s been useful. Featuring in AI searches is different, because the search engine summarises the points on the page and you don’t need to go anywhere else. The number of people clicking through to my website from an AI search will be small fraction of the total. I’ve written just short of two million words on sustainability on this website, and that is all now fodder for the generative AI engines. Again, I’m not the only one to notice how writers lose out here. A McKinsey report into AI search engines suggested that as much as half of internet traffic could be at risk.

It’s worth re-reading that last sentence, because half of internet traffic is no small thing. AI can and will be used for a great many things. Surprise surprise, its most significant application so far is to seize the total wordcount of the internet – something we all built together – and enslave it to serve the world’s biggest corporations and their shareholders. Hooray for capitalism.

I’ve written this blog as a gift, which is why I’ve never monetised it or put it behind a paywall. In checking in on my referrals over 2025, I can see how my generosity with my writing has been abused. I didn’t just give my articles to readers and like-minded folks on the internet. I also gave them to Google, Facebook and OpenAI.

Where does that leave bloggers like me in 2026? Perhaps I am stuck with a communication strategy that is now a historical curiosity rather than a live medium. Like a pamphleteer, standing on a street corner offering passers-by my freshly inked ‘admonition to the citizens of the internet, wherein the tenets of sustainability are expounded, injustices lamented and general thoughts on the improvement of the world are suggested’.

Then again, I wonder if there’s an element of resistance in writing anyway. The internet is drowning in a flood of AI generated slop. Humanity’s intelligence is insulted a billion times a day by the attention economy. Isn’t thoughtful, nuanced and responsible writing more important than ever? Isn’t there something vital about a commitment to truth, to critical thinking, and resisting easy answers?

Despite the complexities and the changing landscape, I find my motivation to write remains undimmed. The aim behind the Earthbound Report was originally to document what I was learning and share it with anyone who might be interested. My curiosity about the world and its interconnected issues hasn’t gone anywhere, and I continue to learn new things every day. While I write for others and for advocacy, writing helps me to organise my own thoughts and distill them into opinions. That in itself would be a good reason to carry on. And maybe, in the midst of the AI landgrab of the online landscape, good quality longform writing by actual humans might turn out to be something rather valuable.