RSS Feeds Send Me More Traffic Than Google

A blogger casually dropped a tiny internet bombshell: over the last 28 days, about 25% of their traffic came from people subscribed through RSS and email, beating Google as a source of visits. In plain English, the old-school “follow my site directly” crowd is sending more people than the world’s biggest search engine. For readers nostalgic for the earlier web, this was basically catnip. The vibe was part celebration, part panic, part “wait, are those numbers even real?”

That’s where the comment drama kicked in. One camp immediately yelled selection bias: of course a writer focused on the open web and personal blogging would attract RSS-loving readers. Another skeptic pointed out that feed readers often fetch articles automatically, so some of that “traffic” may be robot-like background loading rather than actual eyeballs. Ouch. But others saw a darker twist: maybe Google traffic is fading because people now get spoon-fed AI summaries and never click the original source. That hot take landed with a thud of existential dread for anyone who makes things online.

Then came the niche-web flexing. Some commenters argued that if you’ve built real trust and a loyal following, you can stop obsessing over search rankings and weird headline games. In other words: community beats algorithms. And tucked into the thread was a very 2020s joke-disguised-as-a-serious-point: maybe the answer to drowning in too many feeds is, naturally, more AI. The comments may have been small in number, but the mood was loud: the old internet isn’t dead, it’s just hiding in your subscriptions.