Blogs are dead.

Do you agree?

I don’t.

You can debate how useful a blog is to the person writing it—but one thing is undeniable: blogs dramatically increase the surface area of a website. They give crawlers of every kind more reasons to find you, understand you, and index you.

There was a time when high-quality, SEO-optimised blogs reliably drove traffic. That era is changing—but not in the way most people think.

Traditional search engines may be giving way to AI-powered discovery. The “reader” of a blog might no longer be human. It may be an AI agent—reading, summarising, and reporting back to its masters what it found.

And that’s fine.

What is fading away is the easy, ugly revenue model: banner ads everywhere—above the fold, below the fold, mid-paragraph—turning reading into an obstacle course.

This takes me back to my master’s days, when we had to build a search engine from scratch. Scraping wasn’t trivial. We wrote complex algorithms to extract the actual content—stripping away HTML noise and advertising clutter just to get to the real text.

That experience makes the future feel obvious.

Ad revenue from blogs hasn’t just declined—it has already migrated. Instagram. YouTube. Facebook. Short-form, high-attention platforms won that game.

And now, thanks to OpenAI’s experiments, that next shift is happening right in front of us—inside ChatGPT itself.

Personally, I trust ChatGPT’s UX discipline and leadership to resist the temptation to reclaim whitespace for ads.

If that holds true, blogs won’t be dead.

They’ll simply stop being written for humans alone.

And that might be their most interesting chapter yet.