Why writing articles is a bit pointless right now

For years, SEO was simple: find what people search for, write an article, rank on Google and get traffic. That mechanism still exists, but every part of it is getting weaker. There is much more content, AI can generate another article in seconds, Google increasingly answers questions without sending people anywhere, and more information is consumed through social media, video and AI assistants instead of websites.

So before writing another 1,500-word article called “10 reasons why your company needs a website”, it is worth asking whether anyone actually needs it.

Google increasingly keeps the answer to itself

This is probably the biggest change. Pew Research Center analysed almost 69,000 Google searches. When an AI summary appeared, users clicked a normal search result in only 8% of visits, compared with 15% when there was no AI summary. Links inside the AI summary itself were clicked in just 1% of visits.

Similarweb clickstream data analysed by SparkToro shows an even broader trend: 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of 2026.

So your article can work perfectly: Google finds it, understands it, uses it to answer the question – and nobody visits your website.

The easiest way to see this is to try it yourself. Search Google for “how many calories are in a banana”, “what is the capital of Australia” or “euro exchange rate”. You get the answer in the search results, along with an AI summary. There is no reason to click anything. And below it sit a dozen or so websites that have each written 1,200 words about it.

The internet is flooded with content

Producing mediocre content used to require some effort. Today you can ask an LLM to produce 50 SEO articles before lunch.

Ahrefs analysed 900,000 newly discovered English-language webpages and estimated that 74.2% contained at least some AI-generated content. Only 2.5% were classified as fully AI-generated, and AI detectors are not perfectly reliable, so the exact numbers should be treated carefully.

But the direction is obvious: the cost of producing generic text has fallen to zero. Simply having an article has almost no value anymore. If your article contains nothing that ChatGPT could recreate in 20 seconds, there is probably not much reason for it to exist.

You can see this in specific formats. “What is marketing automation”, “10 e-commerce trends for 2026”, “The pros and cons of remote work” – these articles already exist in hundreds of nearly identical versions across hundreds of company blogs. The only differences are the headline and the logo in the corner.

People consume information differently too

The claim that “people don’t read anymore” is too simplistic. People still read, but attention is shifting.

According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, 54% of respondents across 48 markets use social media and video networks for news, compared with 51% using news websites and apps. 77% consume online news video every week. Among people aged 18–24, 52% say social media, video platforms and AI chatbots are their main route to news.

This is news-specific data, so it does not prove that nobody wants to read technical articles or product comparisons. But it clearly shows that websites are no longer automatically the destination. Sometimes the website is just the source behind the answer.

So are blogs dead?

No. Google says Search usage is still at record levels, and AI assistants are starting to send some traffic to websites.

What is dying, however, is a specific model: keyword → generic article → Google ranking → free traffic. Especially for simple questions.

If someone searches “What is a CRM?”, they probably do not need a 1,800-word blog post anymore. Google can explain it. ChatGPT can explain it. Gemini can explain it.

In short

Writing articles is not pointless. Writing another generic article because “blogging is good for SEO” increasingly is.

There is more content than ever. Much of it is AI-assisted. Google resolves more searches without clicks. AI assistants answer questions directly. Social and video platforms absorb more and more attention. So if people often get their information from sources other than articles, and SEO is changing, it is sometimes worth asking, before writing an article, whether condensing the idea into a single short video would be more appealing to today’s audience.

Sources

Pew Research Center, 2025 – Google AI summaries and click behaviour
Similarweb / SparkToro, 2026 – zero-click Google searches
Ahrefs, 2025 – AI-generated content analysis
Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2026
Google / Alphabet, 2026 – Search and AI usage data