Is Blogging Still Worth It For SEO In 2026?

Blogging has been a staple of content marketing for long enough that some businesses have formed and grown within that era, never knowing a state of being without it as a strategy.

But with how much has been changing with Google and content consumption in general in recent years, it makes sense to ask whether blogging still makes sense.

In short, I think it’s still relevant… BUT only with certain considerations in place. I’ll detail those here.

Key Ideas I’ll Cover:

• Novelty in blog material
• AI content scaling
• The debate around informational content

Blog Content Is More Than Just A Deliverable

I think it’s always been a mistake for companies to view blog material as “just a thing that needs to be done.” In years past you could get away with that, as long as the blogs were about the right topics and done consistently.

This commodification usually led to superficial articles. Business owners often feel that giving too much away jeopardizes sales opportunities, and this is a point of friction I’ve encountered many times working with folks. I saw firsthand how true the opposite was, as early as 2007 in my first white collar job doing marketing for a tax firm.

We had a blog with top rankings in the region on IRS installment agreements for a good while, and it was largely because we were more detailed and thoughtful than all of our competition. We arguably gave enough information away to make ourselves unneeded — for a reader to handle the process themselves. Instead, a significant amount of them called us for help.

I would argue that with Google’s bigger algorithm changes to weed out spam, to determine “helpful content,” it’s more important than ever to address this need. You simply can’t publish vague assertions anymore and expect much to happen. Not only will those types of posts not rank, at this point they may not even be indexed.

(If they are not indexed, they’ll never even be considered for placement.)

What this means: Blogging definitely helps for SEO. But you should blog because you also have things to share, and you care about sharing them. That will come through in the delivery.

And the reverse is true: if you’re phoning it in just to get material up for rankings, readers will feel that. It used to still work just enough that you could get away with it, but it increasingly seems to be a waste of effort these days.

If you and your team don’t have the time and the interest in blogging well, either hire someone who does or skip it. It will be a waste of your time otherwise.

AI Content Scaling Had Its Brief Time In The Sun, and It’s Over.

This doesn’t mean you can’t use AI to help you write content, outline your piece, or do research. (Although definitely vet the research.)

But like anything in SEO, once something is quick and works well, it’s abused until it breaks. Scaled AI content, where folks were publishing a post a day or even multiple posts per day, has attracted the wrong sort of attention from search engines. It makes sense: the more redundant fluff there is out there the more weight to the index. The more compute time spent deciding between those pages for search results. The more time a search engine’s crawlers have to spend reviewing pages.

Consider this. Because LLMs were trained on publicly available information, that’s the information they use to write material as well, when asked. This means by definition there will be nothing novel about that information. There’s no lived experience and no opinion given. There’s just a restatement of other people’s words, based on stuff that already exists out there.

If you’re Google or Bing, why would you bother indexing that material when it’s just repackaging stuff you already have indexed? Stuff that’s probably already ranking.

Google in particular had no choice but to become far pickier about blog and page content, because the rate at which new URLs were being added with AI became completely untenable to crawl and process. Just like a person having to triage, the move became, “Find ways to disqualify quickly.”

This becomes another version of the same truth: If you aren’t willing to devote the time and energy to blog well, it’s not worth either.

Ideal blog posts:

• Feature novel information or personal takes on things, based on your own experience.
• Challenge conventional wisdom where appropriate, again with real examples.
• Take wisdom mentioned elsewhere and meaningfully discuss, explore, or further unpack it.
• Provide readers with actionable information.
• Are reinforced by real pictures or media that explain, reinforce, or depict what you’re discussing.

Even when you’re talking about a topic that’s been covered well already, the above items are ways to make it meaningful enough to potentially rank. Those are not guarantees that will happen, but they keep you in the game. Without those things, you arguably aren’t in the game anymore.

The Informational Content Debate

For a few years now there have been an increasing number of people in the SEO space arguing that informational content isn’t worthwhile to write anymore. To my mind, this largely cropped up when Google first introduced rich snippets.

Folks were saying that since Google was quoting people directly, it was plagiarizing the informational material without sending readers to those pages anymore. Others argued how this was an opportunity to visibility, even if you didn’t rank #1.

This continued into Google’s AI overviews which much more thoroughly provide summaries of different pages that answer a user’s question. There are links to those referenced pages and articles, but there’s still an argument that if these summaries adequately answer the question, there’s no reason for a reader to click through to the source pages.

The alternative, the argument often goes, is that the only pages worth writing now are “money pages.”

I understand the rationale there and I don’t think it’s entirely wrong. However, I do think that reasoning is leaving a few things on the table:

• Informational content still expands your website’s total perceived authority on various topics, which helps you rank better for “money pages” and buying-intent queries. So even in cases where AI summaries have taken opportunity away from an informational post, that post can still indirectly add value to the website.
• If you’re writing about complex topics where the answer isn’t as simple as yes or no, or when someone was born, there’s likely still a bunch that a reader wants to explore. They may not get that from the AI summaries, so they’ll still continue on into the organic search results beneath it.
• There’s a more recent focus on being featured in LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. Searches in those places are still small compared to Google; last year Erin Martin mentioned LLMs handled 37 million searches versus Google’s 14 billion. Still, being cited in those LLMs can take users directly to your material. In many cases, what gets content featured in LLMs shares many similarities to what gets you ranked on Google. It’s not to say that LLM features is “just doing SEO” because there’s nuance there, but there is a lot of common strategy between the two.
• While I wouldn’t bank on this with every piece you write, you can still sometimes convert prospects out of informational, top-of-funnel posts. I’ve done it. I say that to say, while it’s tougher than doing this on a dedicated bottom-of-funnel “money page,” don’t see info pieces as lacking value because they can’t convert.

Also Check These Out:

• Building Authority On A New Website (Choosing topics and organizing material)
• Authentic Thought Leadership vs. Same-y Drivel (Using the right kinds of examples)