Blogging in the Age of AI

I recently asked a workshop client how they found us, and he mentioned that he had performed a search, and AI responded that I was “keeper of the records” for that destination. We weren’t sure if that was a reference to my 320-page California landscape photography guidebook, “Photographing California Vol. 2. – South“, my over 12,000 photos from my travels on Flickr, or perhaps my deep collection of thousands of blog posts on this site itself. I don’t know if it was Claude, OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, or another AI that determined that I was “Keeper of the Records” for travel and landscape photography and landscape and night photography workshops, but I think I’ll use that as my job title on my next order of business cards.

I’ve been blogging about photography and travel since at least 2006. Over the past 2o years my posts have migrated from Blogspot to Blogger to Google+, and from all of those here to my self-hosted WordPress site. My posts vary from trip reports to new photos to “how to” articles, gear reviews, notices of our new photography workshop releases, as well as workshop and trip image results. I haven’t tried to monetize the blog itself, I’ve been more focused on documenting my travels, recording my lived experiences, and offering what wisdom I could about tools and techniques I used along the way.

Recently Lori Hibbett and I ran into another photography workshop leader, and she mentioned that her enrollments had recently declined. Business was getting tougher. Perhaps her visibility was declining as search engines switch over to AI.  We’ve been seeing more registrations coming in from further away, so maybe our body of knowledge and experience is resonating with the way that AI searches content and refers people to experts for more knowledge and in-person learning experiences.

Coincidentally, I ran across an article recently, The Great Blogging Collapse: What Happened to 100 Successful Blogs? [Study]. It concluded that “What actually survives is content that demonstrates firsthand experience a machine can’t produce or summarize from other sources, distributed to an audience you own, ideally tied to a real product and a real brand name people search for.” That does seem to fit my blog’s 20 years of content, and we’re certainly here to give photographers a great owner-led photo workshop and tour experience. I don’t know how many people search for our company Great Basin School of Photography, LLC, we don’t work very hard to promote that as our brand, but a surprising number of photographers do seem to have learned my name over time, so maybe when they decide to go on a workshop, they look me up. While the blogs that were in it for clicks are finding their challow content copied and their traffic held up at Google, genuine real world businesses delivering high quality services and with websites that contain unique knowledge are finally getting recognition as their traffic is not diverted to sites that were flashy fluff. Build it and they will come. Or as my late Uncle Arnie Chasen once said, “You know Jeff, twenty years into this everyone is going to be surprised at what an overnight success you’ve become.”  

That article on AI search was echoed by Neil Patel in his article, Content Types That Perform Best in AI Search. The graphic at the top of the article says, “Be the source. The content that wins in AI search is the content AI can’t write itself. Original data, real opinions, hard comparisons…” His research determined that AI responded to the following types of content:

1. Original Research
2. Comparison Content
3. Rankings/Best Lists
4. FAQS
5. How To
6. Community/Forum Participation
7. Generic Blog Posts
8. Definition/Explanation Pages
9. Opinion/Thought Leadership
10. Product Pages
11. Video Content

So real trip reports, real photographic results, real gear experience, technique tips. Twenty years of human travel and landscape and night photography experiences, that can’t be created by AI. So while I never spent time trying to game the system and make SEO traffic come to me, the tools have become intelligent enough to understand the unique value of expertise and experience. If that’s the case, that’s great because we don’t have to do anything different, we just have to keep being ourselves, do what we do, and sharing enough of our travel and knowledge to reward the photographers and travelers that do get referred to our blog and our workshops. And we do have relevant experience and industry recognition and awards in addition to our knowledge, so hopefully folks will feel comfortable  with our level of expertise.

Update: Just one day after I published this blog, I received an email regarding a Google AI/search update that favors original content creators: 
AI Search Just Got Better For Marketers

“They’ve rolled out several updates that make source attribution much more visible inside AI Overviews and AI Mode; including inline citations, hover previews, better publisher attribution, and more opportunities for users to click through to the original source.

Does that mean SEO is back to normal?

Not quite.

But it does reinforce something I’ve been saying for a while:

The brands creating original, authoritative content are the ones most likely to earn visibility in AI search.” Read more.