Google did the dirty on creators, publishers and pretty much everybody else in 2023 with its ironically-named Helpful Content Update.
It then rolled out its much-maligned AI Overviews, the single biggest exercise in plagiarism ever conceived, and things haven’t really improved since.
The Old Google is Dead.
As someone that grew up with Google, practically living in its search engine, using it every day. It actually pained me to write that heading.
But it’s true. The Google we knew is no more. It’s turned its back on its founding principle: don’t be evil, and is now all-in on whatever’s going to make it the most money.
Apparently, that’s AI and lots and lots of ads in the search results.
You search for something. An AI Overviews carousel appears at the top of the page, even if it has nothing to offer.
Below it, sponsored content and adverts.
You scroll some more, get to the bottom of the page and, if you’re lucky, you’ll find an actual organic result.
It doesn’t even feel like a search engine anymore; it’s more like an advertising / e-commerce directory site with a shonky AI chatbot at the top.
I don’t know who signed off on this new profit-first approach to search in Google, but they should be ashamed of themselves. One of the greatest products ever devised by human beings has been effectively ruined.
And the worst part? It all happened in the space of 24 months.
The old Google, the reliable custodian of the internet, is dead. The new AI-and-profit-at-any-cost Google has taken over.
The SERPs have never looked worse, CTRs from AI searches are terrible, so the great and good are now moving elsewhere, somewhere they can build on more stable ground.
Newsletters Are The New Blogging
This is why newsletters have become increasingly more popular with publishers and creators.
You have control, there’s no algorithms to worry about.
Substack has been a game changer for me and the main reason is simple. After years of working my butt off as a blogger trying to build an email list, I find that on Substack, things are relatively effortless in terms of actual audience-building. In fact, the audience is practically building itself.
Karen Banes
You build a platform with a purpose, market it to people that are interested in that type of thing, and deliver value.
And the best part? It runs without the hamster-in-a-wheel ferocity of SEO.
Most newsletters only do a couple of posts a week.
The Rise of Substack
Substack is a newsletter / blogging platform, kind of a hybrid of the two. But it also supports video and podcasts too. And you can run paid newsletters too.
The platform now boasts over 20 million monthly active subscribers, with website traffic surging to 47.6 million unique visitors in September 2025—a notable 65% increase year-over-year.
Source
It’s free to use, anyone can sign up and it’s easy to use. For anyone looking to start building an audience, I honestly don’t think there’s a more beginner-friendly platform out there.
If you need more features, more customization options and growth tools, there’s a paid version. Most will be fine with the free version though.
I have my own Substack (although it’s for my content marketing agency, not this site) and I really enjoy writing and sharing on the platform.
I use Kit for this site because it’s more feature-rich when it comes to things like email sequences, audience segmentation, and it has built in e-commerce for digital products.
But if you’re a writer that wants to write, Substack is the place for you. There’s 30+ million people on there and, unlike most modern platforms these days, they’re all avid readers.
It’s great for novelists, researchers, thinkers, bloggers, freelancers, podcasters – anyone creative, essentially.
But what I like most about Substack is that written content is still king.
It’s a proper writer’s platform.
You get a feed of new stuff to read every day from creators in the ecosystem and people you subscribe to, so it’s great for learning and brilliant for connecting with like-minded people in your niche.
Plenty of creators make a living via Substack too, ranging from a few hundred bucks a month to six figures. It all depends on the size of your paid audience.
Metric2025 ValueMonthly Active Subscribers20 millionUnique Website Visitors (Sept)47.6 millionTotal Active Subscriptions35–50 millionPaid Subscriptions5 million+Paid Writers17,000+Paid Publications50,000+Top 10 Authors’ Annual Earnings$40 millionNewsletters earning $500K+/year52Substack Valuation$650 million
But it can be done.
Is it perfect? No. There’s things I don’t like about it, features that aren’t present. But in the age of AI slop, I like to think of Substack as a safe haven where I can actually read good, well thought out content from people that care about writing and spreading ideas.
There’s no SEO, no optimization required for posts. There’s the odd over zealous guru on there but they are few and far between. Plus, you only get updates from people you actually follow.
I turn off Posts notifications. I subscribe to the people I like and I get emailed when they publish. Simple.
I follow essayists, photographers, historians, marketing types, and a couple of political commentators. I would never have found these people on Google.
And if you can no longer find what you want on Google, if good content has no visibility in search, what exactly is the point of using it anymore? Gen Z has already come to this conclusion.
Now the rest of us are now starting to wake up to this fact too.
