Food blogs are ramping up their content as we head into peak food holiday season.

• Easy, homemade, and baked topped this week’s recipe title descriptors.

• Pumpkin, chicken, chocolate, turkey, and apple were the most popular ingredients being blogged about.

• Dinner, Thanksgiving, Fall, and Dessert were this week's top recipe categories.

• @kidfriendly.meals grew the most on Instagram this week (5k) while @carribbeanpot grew the most percentage-wise (1.7%). On Facebook, Crowded Kitchen grew by 33K in one week!

• Instagram is allowing creators to add Features, including long-form video up to 90 minutes. Future possibilities for ads and revenue sharing are discussed but not promised. Features are currently in beta testing and not yet widely available.

• WordPress 7.1.4 is out, and it’s a security update, so ensure your site is upgraded.

• Do you run pop-ups on your website? Search Engine Land has a quick test for what is okay and not okay, in terms of SEO.

• Google drops the ability to track who is coming from Gemini to your website.

• Google’s stock had its worst day in trading history on Thursday as Google’s search revenue growth continues to fall. Creators are hoping that Google will change its trajectory and reduce AI overview prominence in results.

I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis, clear-cut insights, and industry news you need to know.

Methodology: We define top food blogs as those running Raptive ads, with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and posts in the past six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 506 sites.

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Two serious PHP security vulnerabilities were found this week. Ensure your host has applied this patch, and if you manage your own server, upgrade PHP immediately.

Food bloggers posted much more last week than they have in a while. New terms in the charts this week include brown butter, Halloween, viral, classic, stuffed, and no-bake.

Kasey from All Things Mamma grew her Instagram by the biggest percentage this week (2.6%), while The Loopy Whisk and Crowded Kitchen grew by 7,000. On Facebook, Crowded Kitchen grew its followers by 57,000!

News Roundup

• Two serious PHP vulnerabilities were discovered and patched, which impact anyone running a WordPress website. See details.

• Google has an internal “clutter score” which is used to penalize sites. This could include ads, intrusive pop-ups, floating videos, and third-party scripts. Casey Markee provides SEO advice for food bloggers.

• It’s worth reading an in-depth study about over 2,100 AI-slop recipe sites which have been made for ad revenue. None were connected to ad network Raptive, 8 to Journey.

• Paid podcast membership options are now available from Spotify and dynamic podcast ads launch in Substack. Substack has also added new brand sponsorship options.

• Raptive launches Compass, an AI dashboard for publishers with recommendations and the ability to connect to external AI tools.

• Dahn Boquist talks to Food Blogger Pro about letting go of SEO and the success of providing meal plans.

I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis and clear-cut insights and industry news you need to know.

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and posted in the past six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites excluded. This week we’re tracking 505 sites.

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Last week I was at a conference where they talked a lot about giving new things a try and sharing our failure stories more often as proof that we are trying new things. What new things have you seen recently in the food creator industry? What have you been trying out? I’d love to hear and share your stories.

I recently saw an interesting new scrollable FAQ card style on Simple Home Edit while trying out her kebab recipe (scroll down through the post to see it in a few places, but especially above the recipe card). What do you think of it?

This week in the charts, slow cooker recipes are back, along with turkey, meatloaf, and curries.

News Roundup

• According to Pew Research, 20% of American adults used a food bank in the past year, up from 11% a decade ago. Will food bloggers begin to routinely show the expected cost per serving, as Budget Bytes has been doing for years?

• Food Blogger Pro has released a new course on how to turn one recipe into content for every platform.

• Food creators were super concerned by new terms of use wording which seemed to give Meta permission to scrape your website if you used Meta for your business. Good news: they’ve now removed this.

• WPRM releases WPRM Kitchen, which might be useful if you run multiple WordPress websites, plus it provides analytics for prints, jump-to-recipe clicks, servings changes, shares, and pins.

• WPRM 10.9.0 is out, and the main new features are the ability to set nutrition servings separately from yield, associate equipment with instructions in Cook Mode, and allow converted units after ingredient names or notes.

• Building trust with email subscribers: Aaron Randhawa from The Forked Spoon talks technical details.

I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis and clear-cut insights and industry news you need to know.

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and that have posted in the past six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 506 sites.

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Last weekend, I went to the World of Wearable Art (WOW) fashion show and was blown away by the wildly weird and beautiful, imaginative creativity on display and the immersive experience; it’s hard to put into words. It amazed me that no one had their phone out, all abiding by the show’s request.

As creators who pour your heart into your very hard work, I want to clap and cheer you on for not only being a spectator and consumer online. You are wonderful! So many people are out there admiring and appreciating your hard work, even if you get little direct feedback. You are adding to the creativity in this world, and no one else in the world does it just like you do.

News Roundup

• It’s not just you… Google Search Console’s Performance Report is extremely delayed right now. See updates from Barry Schwartz on this.

• Google’s Preferred Source button has been out for a little while now, and Google has started sharing analytics for this. We’ve added this button for clients in various ways, and we’ve been so happily surprised by how many of their visitors have clicked on it already.

• Is your WordPress upgraded to the latest version (7.1.3)? This is a security release, so it’s recommended you do it immediately.

• Do you know about Instagram’s trial reels option? Jess Smith of Inquiring Chef attributes trial reels to her Instagram growth of 30K.

• Do you use the JetPack plugin? There are loads of new features in its latest release.

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SEO expert Marie Haynes (did you catch her incredible talks at the Tastemaker Conference in January?) thinks another big core update is on its way for Google after the spam update completes. With Google publishing new AI content guidelines this week, it sounds likely.

News Roundup

• Google has updated its advice for content creators about AI-generated content. Google says it is “critical” that you manually fact-check and review all AI-generated content and recommends letting readers know how the piece of content was created. Read the documentation.

• Google also recently updated its guidance for creating helpful content. One of the new sections is about not having deceptive authorship info, which includes AI-generated headshots, made-up names, or false credentials. The other is all about main content and what Google is looking for (effort, originality, talent/skill, and accuracy).

• Instagram is adding an AI assistant to its CapCut competitor, Edits. Meta says this will provide personalized insights into your Instagram metrics.

• YouTube is changing how it chooses Shorts and is prioritizing new content over re-uploaded content.

• Jessica Holmes of Sweetest Menu shares what it’s like publishing a debut cookbook.

• Yvette Marquez of Muy Bueno shares how she makes money from various income streams.

I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis and clear-cut insights, and industry news you need to know.

Please share this Substack with your food blogging friends!

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and have posted in the past six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 506 sites.

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This week, I analyzed the newly released User Experience Report (CrUX) Ad Metrics, part of Google’s Core Web Vitals, for top food blogs’ homepages. These metrics reflect how ad density and resource usage impact page performance.

Here’s what visitors experience on average:

• Desktop: ~2.7 ads on screen (15% coverage), 43s of CPU time, and 22 MB downloaded.

• Mobile: ~1.5 ads on screen (14% coverage), 13s of CPU time, and 12 MB downloaded.

It’s not surprising that Raptive has kept ad density on these sites well below the Coalition for Better Ads’ ‘unacceptable’ threshold.

However, if you’d ever noticed your device loading a food blog slowly and struggling (fans whirring!), it’s because CPU time and download weights are very high. I’ve noticed this for a while, but now we have the figures.

Raptive, this needs improving urgently.

News Round Up

• Study shows 88% of US installations of WordPress need to be upgraded to be secure. Is yours kept updated regularly? (We offer a Maintenance Plan.) On that note, WordPress releases version 7.1.2, a critical security update.

• Google rolls out a September spam update. Anecdotally, it looks to be helping food bloggers in the Food Bloggers’ Central Facebook group.

• How to overcome camera shyness, an interview with Justin Ellen of Everything Just Baked.

• A comparison guide between WPRM and WP Tasty plugins for WordPress (from the makers of WPRM).

• Using AI for SEO? Here are some things to be aware of. Bottom line as always: don’t blindly trust anything Claude (or ChatGPT, etc.) says.

New Top Food Blogs

Two new sites joined the top food blogs this week:

• oliviascuisine.com

• tosimplyinspire.com

Methodology

Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and have posted in the past six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 509 sites.

About Best Served Hot

I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis, clear-cut insights, and industry news you need to know

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Hello!

I hope you are having a good week. Google’s released a fascinating new tool that evaluates the impact of ads on websites (see the News Roundup below). I’ve been looking at lots of top food blogs, and they’re very heavy with ads, likely using Raptive’s maximum density. I’m working on bringing you a summary of this data for the top food blogs being tracked so you can learn from it.

News Roundup

• Google has provided a new tool to measure the impact of ads on websites, including the average number of ads seen at one time, additional load time and size, and what percentage of the screen (desktop/mobile) is filled with ads (on average). Check how your site compares to others and see the impact ads have on your visitor’s experience.

• Do you have an AI-use policy on your website? It might be a good idea to consider getting in early with one. See examples of how other people are doing them here.

• WordPress 7.1.1 is out; it’s recommended you upgrade immediately to get the security fixes in place.

• Creating connection and equity: Podcast interview with Yoli Ouiya.

• Google Discover tests a button that sends readers to an AI overview, not the original publisher.

I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis, clear-cut insights and industry news you need to know.

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and have posted in the past six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 509 sites.

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While food bloggers were relatively quiet this past week, with only 31% posting a new recipe, Christina Hitchcock of It is a Keeper posted 11 times. Anjali Shah of The Picky Eater had the fastest-growing Instagram account (2.2% growth in the past week), while Crowded Kitchen grew by the largest amount (8K).

Most Popular Recipe Categories & Ingredients

Dinner, Gluten-Free, and Fall were the most popular categories; Chicken, Pumpkin, and Apple were the most popular ingredients.

News Roundup

• California approves its first non-ultra-processed food label, something to keep an eye on if readers want these types of ingredients included in recipes.

• Eater reviews 12 new cookbooks out this fall for inspiration.

• Meta launches its AI agent Muse in the US. Looks like it might be useful to analyze your Facebook and Instagram content, among other things.

• Raptive officially launches its ad-supported community platform and gives 50% of applicable ad revenue to creators.

• Food Blogger Pro launches its Claude for Food Bloggers course.

• Google’s top 10 ranking factors, according to 131 SEO professionals. Relevance, backlinks, and quality were their top 3.

• YouTube is giving feedback on Shorts before they’re published to help you improve them.

• Google once again says sometimes there’s no one right answer for SEO.

• Nerdpress shares how they’re using AI workflows with the Food Blogger Pro podcast.

• Tastemaker Conference discount code - get $50 off your ticket!

About Best Served Hot

I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis, clear-cut insights, and industry news you need to know. Please share this Substack with your food blogging friends!

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and that have posted in the past six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 509 sites. No new sites were added this week.

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Hello!

This week, the top three adjectives used by food bloggers were easy, sweet, and baked; cheesy, stuffed, and savory also made the list. Pumpkin jumped to be the second most popular ingredient after chicken, just beating out apple and chocolate. Christmas has made its first appearance on the categories chart, and Thanksgiving and Winter have climbed.

Over on Instagram, plantyou grew its account by 45K this past week! Explore the rising stars chart too, to see who grew their following by 6% in the last week.

I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis, clear-cut insights, and industry news you need to know.

Figuring out how to organize recipes on a food site can seem really confusing and overwhelming. There’s no single “right” way to do it, but with so many people using AI for guidance, things can so easily get way too complex. So, I decided to simplify it for you. I created a quick cheat sheet with clear guidelines, plus a breakdown of exactly how the top 500 food blogs organize their recipes. If you are planning a site redesign or starting a new food blog, this is going to save you hours of frustration. Hit reply and let me know if you’re interested. Just type “yes please” and I’ll send you the cheat sheet (I’d love to get your feedback on it).

News Roundup

• A good case study of how The Modern Nonna uses the WPRM recipe plugin on its website. Are you using all those features on your site?

• Google launched a competitor to Canva called Google Pics, which integrates seamlessly with Google Slides, Docs, and Drive. Available to those on paid plans.

• SEO expert Lily Ray discusses how shortcuts rarely help your SEO/AI search results and how to improve your content with E-E-A-T and quality, less-is-more information.

• Australian ad industry grew by 14% in the last year to $19.8 billion, and display/video ads showed strong growth. Its ad industry is the best growth in 4 years, a positive sign for food bloggers.

• YouTube will now label brand deals if you don’t disclose them, but still require vloggers to comply with all disclosure laws.

• TikTok comments are enhanced with new voice comments, polls, photo carousel comments, and live photos. The aim is to get people to spend more time in the comments section.

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I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis, clear-cut insights, and industry news you need to know.

From this week’s charts:

• 31% of top food bloggers posted this week, with popular adjectives being easy, homemade, and vegan.

• Top ingredients were chicken, apple, chocolate, and pumpkin.

• Top categories were dinner, dessert, and gluten-free. Thanksgiving has appeared on the charts for the first time this year.

• Plantyou is growing rapidly on Instagram (+22K this week!).

Industry news roundup:

• Pinterest strategist Laura Piper runs an in-depth Pinterest trends report each week, and she’s kindly shared the latest report. You can get more of her reports here.

• Katie Trant from Foodie Brand Lab is hosting a free live webinar on managing your business brand and your founder brand, and how they work together on September 10. Save your spot: foodiebrandlab.com/webinar

• How to audit your food blog in 2026. This detailed guide has a lot of solid information in it if you want to make improvements yourself.

• YouTube now allows creators to tag Amazon products and earn affiliate income if you are in the US and meet their criteria.

• Instagram adds a First Draft feature to make it quicker to make reels.

• As part of a large legal settlement, Meta must limit teens’ time on Instagram and Facebook to a maximum of two hours per day, lock them out overnight, hide like counts by default, and switch to a non-algorithmic feed. Facebook is pushing TikTok and YouTube to make these changes too.

• Almost half of Gen Z families buy prepared food every week and more than 60% purchase groceries online each week. Read the report.

• Facebook traffic is becoming more important to food bloggers. See the data for Pinch of Yum.

• Jeremy Carraso talks on Food Blogger Pro about the importance of trust and disclosing how you use AI.

Please email me back to let me know your thoughts on all things food blogging. Or just say hi, we need more human convos in our inboxes :)

Have a wonderful week,
Rachel

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Thanks for your kind messages while I was sick with Influenza A; it’s the sickest I’ve been with a virus as an adult!

I’m catching up on all things food blogging, and what stood out to me is just how consistent, easy, chicken, gluten-free, and dinner have been for the recipes published by top food bloggers; these stand out by far from the rest. While only 30% posted this week, 6 sites added 10 or more recipes. Over on Instagram, some accounts like @avirtualvegan grew their following by 11% in the past week!

• WordPress 7.1 is out: Lots of new features to explore.

• Food packaging is starting to show “GLP-1 friendly” labels: Will you do this with your recipes?

• YouTube changes how it counts views on all videos: No minimum watch time anymore.

• Pinterest advice for food bloggers: Nadalie Bardo shares what’s working in 2026.

• Build an EEAT checker using Claude Code: Thorough tutorial if you’re interested in doing this for your website (note that it does scrape some websites for their EEAT advice).

• Moz asks: should we stop writing with AI? The answer is yes and no, and it says POV and lived experience are essential.

• How Urban Farmie uses AI: Automating mundane tasks and creating a virtual board of advisors.

• How much of the internet is written with AI? Pew Internet Research estimates 10%.

If we haven’t yet met, I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis, clear-cut insights, and industry news you need to know.

Please share this Substack with your food blogging friends.

Rachel

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and that have posted in the past six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 512 sites.

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I’m still unwell here, recovering from influenza A, so sadly there won’t be an issue released this week either. Thanks in advance for your understanding.

Rachel

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Rachel

I’m coming across more people leaving or considering leaving Substack as subscription fatigue is becoming a thing, and are moving back to WordPress for the ad revenue and integrated website experience, and switching to using a membership paywall to go ad-free. Have you noticed this too?

So… I’m not sure you’re ready for it, but winter recipes are back on the charts with top food bloggers this week. Other new trending recipe types this week include no-bake, keto, peanut butter, and banana.

• Only 29% of top food bloggers posted this week, with the most popular publishing day being Wednesday.

• Instagram is still the most-promoted social media platform (97%), followed by Facebook (91%), Pinterest (87%), YouTube (63%), X (37%), TikTok (37%), and Substack (4%).

• Last week, Substack added an AI-checker and said they didn’t want to become like LinkedIn’s slop. This week, LinkedIn added a “seems like AI slop” button. This is all happening as bots overtook humans in web traffic for the first time, and an ad-industry report found AI-generated content passed premium quality checks 70% of the time.

• Google opens Social Search Console data to everyone, allowing you to track how your posts on Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube perform on Google Search, Discover, and Google News.

• This week’s Food Blogger Pro episode warns food bloggers to check their archives for link spam, such as link swaps, arrangements with friends, roundups arranged via spreadsheets, or ghostwriter cross-links.

• Raptive releases an interactive workbook for understanding Google Discover, along with a demo if you’re not with them.

If we haven’t yet met, I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis and clear-cut insights and industry news you need to know. Please share this Substack with your food blogging friends.

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and have posted in the past six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 518 sites.

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• Substack has added the ability to check if a post is likely to have been written by AI. The tool, Pangram, is not perfect, and some fear this will lead to witch-hunts. Others are hopeful that this will protect the platform from being overrun with “slop”.

• Eater writes about a low-key anti-AI visual trend on Instagram, such as handwritten announcements on pieces of paper rather than perfect (too-perfect?) photos. Have you ever shown your handwriting or recipe-making notes in your posts?

• Casey Markee says your food blog SEO strategy in 2026 must include making your content easier for LLMs to understand. He predicts that the bloggers who win in 2026 will be the ones who make their content easier to understand, trust, and remember, rather than it being about publishing volume, AI tools, or trending SEO buzzwords.

• Food Blogger Pro interviews Sam Vander Wielen, who shares how story, personality, voice, authenticity, and lived experience matter more than ever when AI easily provides information.

• This week, the charts are full of chicken, zucchini, peach, and corn recipes, with coconut and pineapple joining the top ingredients chart for the first time. Dinner, Summer, and Gluten Free are the most popular types of recipes being posted.

• @kasey_allthingsmamma grew her smaller Instagram account by 14% in the past week; have a look at her content to see why.

• Week after week, I’ve watched Pinterest follower counts decrease for all the top food blog accounts. Pinterest follower counts no longer seem a meaningful measure to focus on or follow, so I’ll be dropping that chart. Do you have a chart you’d like added? Let me know!

If we haven’t yet met, I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive charts and industry news you need to know.

If you find this analysis valuable, please consider sharing this Substack with your food blogging friends.

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and have posted in the past six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 517 sites.

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Peach rose to be the third most popular recipe ingredient being blogged about this week, after chicken and pasta. Cherry entered the ingredient charts for the first time, while fall entered the category charts for the first time, in 19th position, while Dinner, Summer, and Desserts are the most popular three.

On socials, gluten-free blogger Mama Gourmand grew her following by 12% this past week!

News to know:

• Critical WordPress security update: Make sure you upgrade to version 7.0.2 as soon as possible.

• WordPress 7.1 beta preview: New features on their way include a more personalized admin experience.

• Original content ranks: New Google patent again indicates the importance of original content, and what that means.

• Google images redesigns to be more like Pinterest: After 25 years of Google images (!), the redesign enables you to save collections.

• SEO advice for food bloggers from Casey Markee: Includes advice on formatting posts and off-site PR.

• Evergreen content is over: Advice is to build around what only you can say instead.

If we haven’t yet met, I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis and clear-cut insights and industry news you need to know.

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and have posted in the past six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 518 sites.

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• The Yummy Life, Slap Dash Mom, and Dinner, then Dessert all posted 10+ posts on their blogs this week.

• Isabel Eats, Averie Sunshine, and Fantabulosity Blog grew their Instagram followings the most.

• Dinner, Summer, Dessert, Gluten Free, and Vegetarian recipes were the most popular categories for recipes.

• Chicken, zucchini, and strawberry were the top ingredients in recipes this week.

News Roundup

• Food blogging communities: This article covers a decent list of options.

• Meta removes AI feature after backlash: It allowed users to modify photos from public Instagram accounts using AI.

• WordPress 7.0.1 is out: No new features; this fixes 31 bugs.

• Hypertexting is a new way to follow blogs: The app has no ads, algorithm, or AI slop in your feed.

How the Top 500 Food Blogs Organize Their Recipes

Figuring out how to organize recipes on a food site can seem really confusing and overwhelming. There’s no single “right” way to do it, but with so many people using AI for guidance, things can so easily get way too complex.

So, I decided to simplify it for you.

I created a quick cheat sheet with clear guidelines, plus a breakdown of exactly how the top 500 food blogs organize their recipes. (The same ones in Best Served Hot.)

If you are planning a site redesign or starting a new food blog, this is going to save you hours of frustration.

Hit reply and let me know if you’re interested. Just type “yes please” and I’ll send you the cheat sheet (I’d love to get your feedback on it).

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For those in the US, I hope you had a wonderful holiday weekend!

This week, the top food bloggers published 722 posts, largely between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. Eastern, with Tuesday and Wednesday providing the most activity (19% and 18%). It’s all about summer seasonal posts and ingredients this week, with ice cream, peach, cherry, salmon, and shrimp are new or rising in the charts. Rose Atwater of Rose Bakes published 12 posts in the last week, second to The Yummy Life, which consistently posts at least 20 per week.

I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis and clear-cut insights and industry news you need to know.

If you find this analysis valuable, please consider sharing this Substack with your food blogging friends.

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and have posted in the six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 518 sites.

• Google AI mode improves this for food bloggers - they’ve added prominent links at the top of responses with the creator name, recipe ratings and number of ingredients. Inspired Taste says this is a good step in the right direction, but the AI full recipes need to go since they’re often incorrect and attributed still to the food blogger.

• WP Recipe Maker 10.7.0 is out - a beta AI assistant has been included for Elite membership plans, plus improved roundup list workflows.

• TikTok shop has doubled its food product sales in the past year. If you are creating (or considering) food products, this is worth learning about.

• Google says meta descriptions are useful but not required. There’s no penalty if you don’t have one, but most food bloggers are using Yoast which will automatically generate one. Google often rewrites meta descriptions, too.

• Taryn Solie talks about the future of Hot Pan Kitchen - what to do when traffic and income drops 40%. Her strategies include cutting plugin and tool expenses, focusing on video, and using AI to reduce costs.

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It’s that time of year: 4th of July has appeared on the category charts for the first time, in 14th place, along with American in 18th. Holidays dropped to 20th. Grilled jumps to second place for descriptors, behind easy. Summer ingredients also dominate, with corn, strawberry, blueberry, peach, and zucchini all making the top 20.

Carleig Bodrug’s Plant You and mother-daughter duo Beth Sinclair & Lexi Harrison’s Crowded Kitchen are growing rapidly on socials, each with new cookbooks.

• Raptive analyzed 103K post updates: large updates (10%+ change in word count), drove about 9% more Google pageview growth than smaller ones.

• Raptive analyzed the Google May 2026 update: 70% of their sites improved or remained stable. Lower ad density was one of the clearest site-level signals in the analysis. Their report offers many useful recommendations.

• Google June 2026 spam update rolls out - this shouldn’t affect your site.

• Instagram to add longer-form videos, including reel “series” and live TV.

• Facebook is changing its Creator Studio tool; it will become an AI companion app designed to help creators grow their audiences on Facebook. There’s a waitlist for now.

• YouTube updates Shorts by removing the dislike button, doubling playback speed, and more.

• Rebecca Blackwell talks about diversifying income from multiple websites.

• Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju talks about her use of AI in food blogging.

If we haven’t yet met, I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis and clear-cut insights, as well as industry news you need to know.

If you find this analysis valuable, please consider sharing this Substack with your food blogging friends.

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and have posted in the past six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 519 sites.

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Lots of fruits in the top recipe ingredients charts - strawberry, lemon, peach, blueberry, banana, and pineapple. Plus ice cream makes its debut. Easy is still the top descriptor, but roasted, smoked, and fried are new. Kid Friendly Meals grew 28K on Instagram, and Oh How Civilised grew their following by 9.4% in one week to 277K!

In the news this week

• Maddie’s Secret: This brand new satirical drama film is sure to get people talking. It’s about a food creator with a secret eating disorder. Have you seen it? (I haven’t, it’s released outside the US later on.)

• LinkedIn shows new reach measures: Few food bloggers heavily use LinkedIn, but for those who do, you can now see post impressions from connections and followers and those from users who had no prior relationship with the poster - giving you a direct measure of whether your content is expanding an audience or circulating within one.

• Growing your email list: Strategies from Pinch of Yum, particularly how they’re using GRO.

• Why recipes might fail: A handy guide and checklist for receipe developers

• Google updates, AI search, and what matters for your blog in 2026: Watch the webinar replay from Food Blogger Pro and Yoast.

• Trend Hunters - Food: A site to keep an eye on as it tracks the latest food trends, product launches, and ad campaigns.

If we haven’t yet met, I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis and clear-cut insights and industry news you need to know.

If you find this analysis valuable, please consider sharing this Substack with your food blogging friends.

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and have posted in the six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 520 sites.

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