This week, 708 new posts were published by the top 521 food blogs. The most popular categories this week were Dinner, Gluten Free, and Summer. Recipes with the descriptor “grilled” in them have jumped to the second spot, after the always-popular “easy”. New to the top 20 were “marinated”, “perfect”, and “simple”. The top ingredients this week were chicken, pasta, and strawberries. Shrimp and oatmeal joined the Top 20 ingredients.

Roundups made up 3% weekly meal plans, which sat at 2% of posts this week.

• Raptive launches Raptive Intelligence: I do wonder what they will do with the “stealth agentic food-intelligence platform” they have acquired. Perhaps this will be a part of a revamped Slickstream, which is installed on so many food blogs and hasn’t been updated in a long time. What are your thoughts?

• Grocers are catering to GLP-1 users: I’m yet to see any food blogger address this rapidly growing market. Have you seen anyone mentioning this in their meal guides or recipes? Let me know!

• Food Blogger Pro talks to Joy to the Food founder Mika Kinney on growing her Instagram following and site traffic, and her current focus on membership.

• Do you use the Updraft Plus plugin? Make sure you upgrade to the latest version, which fixes a security vulnerability.

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.

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 521 sites.

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Here are some big picture insights:

• Food bloggers heavily favor ultra-short headlines, averaging just 5.3 words. 87% completely omit the word “recipe,” while 13% use brackets, like (No-Bake) or (Ready in 5 Minutes).

• While titles stay short, bloggers use an average of 6.8 categories per post.

• Gluten-free content dominates at 17%, followed closely by chicken (12%), “easy” descriptors (11%), and Italian cuisine (10%). Roundups made up 6% of the week’s content, while weekly meal plans sat at 3%.

This Week’s News

• Rand Fiskin’s solutions for creators in the AI landscape: build inimitable products that “cannot be replicated with pixels or words on a web page, and are desperately sought-after by people.” I love how he’s thinking about the problem.

• Google launched Search Profiles for creators, but they’re currently only available in the US and with at least 100K followers on Instagram, YouTube, or X, or 300K on TikTok. Oddly, Facebook followers aren’t an option. For new and smaller creators, this unequal access to a new form of promotion is frustrating.

• Ben Jabbawy from GRO (formerly Grocer’s List) talks about ways to grow your following on the Food Blogger Pro podcast. GRO is free until you reach 15K followers. Their new paid member plugin with gated and ad-free content for WordPress is worth exploring.

• Raptive talks to food bloggers about why they wish they had switched to the ad network earlier.

• Flavor & The Menu lists their Top 10 Food Trends for 2026, including kimchi, tiramisu, and retro dips.

• Understand your Domain Ranking score. I use Moz’s DA score of 40+ for one of the inclusion criteria for this report.

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.

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and have posted in the last six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 526 sites.

See the Detailed Charts:

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Thank you for all the helpful feedback about how to make these issues better! The first change you’ll see is that the News Roundup is now commentary about how to apply this to your blog. From next week, you’ll see more commentary on the weekly charts, too.

From inside this issue:

• 31% of the top food blogs posted this week

• Easy, Creamy, and Best remained the top adjectives in recipe titles

• Chicken, Strawberry, and Pasta were the top ingredients

• Dinner, Summer, and Gluten-free were the top categories

• Little Epicurean grew her Instagram following by over 5% this past week to 70K

• Pinterest follower growth is pretty much non-existent across the board, week after week - even for those with millions of followers

This Week’s News Roundup

1. Add to Preferred Sources: Considering adding a button for this to your website. Google has now expanded its “Add to Preferred Google Sources” to all websites; previously, this was just for news sites.

2. Food podcasts: The WPRM blog has a list of food podcasts that focus on improving your cooking/baking skills, but I was surprised to not see any of the top food bloggers as I scrolled through. With podcasts exploding in popularity (an estimated 40% of American adults listened to podcasts weekly last year), perhaps this is a way to diversify your income streams by talking through the stories behind your recipes, how you meal plan, shop, and do life?

3. Tips for marketing a cookbook: This interview with book publishing insider Stephanie Moon is encouraging if you’re starting out. She says a small, highly engaged audience (even under 5K) is much more valuable to publishers and book sales than a massive audience of unengaged followers or bots.

4. Learning from Etsy’s new ad campaign: Their 1-minute-long “Celebrate being human” ad has me all teary as it leans into celebrating human moments over digital ones. Their CEO, Brad Minor, says story, craft, and human connection carry more value than convenience alone: “It’s never been more important to choose something human-made, original, and specific to the person buying it.” Food is at the heart of every human celebration, and a homemade meal or food gift is better than a store-bought one. Perhaps food bloggers can be inspired by this ad campaign and leverage it too. I wrote a little about the gift of food on my food blog, Friday’s Pizza.

I’m also working on two big analyses of how the top food bloggers organize all their recipes and how they do their email marketing.

If there are other big topics you’d like tackled in the future, do let me know!

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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 526 sites.

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• Instagram adds ‘Instants’ tool

• YouTube viewers watch 2 billion hours of Shorts on TVs each month

• Google’s AI optimization guide

• What the SEO industry is getting dangerously wrong about AI search

• What a food blogger retreat is really like

• Why good content still loses in Google Search

Hello!

If this is a long weekend for you, I hope it’s a good one. We’ll have our long weekend in New Zealand next week for King’s Birthday. I’ve been unwell the past few days, so this issue is a little lighter than normal.

I’m working on making Best Served Hot a must-have resource for food bloggers. I’d love to know what you think.

I’ve also just dropped the price to $9/month ($89/year) to make it more accessible.

If there’s something I could change to make it more valuable to you, please let me know.

Thank you!
Rachel

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• Instagram purges millions of accounts

• Facebook lockouts on the rise

seo & business

• Study: Food blogs beat AI

• Google removed back button trigger for ads

• Ways to generate income through food blogs

tools & strategy

• WordPress 7.0 won’t include real-time collaboration after all

• Improving your emails

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This week’s big news is Google releasing its first-ever AI Search guide. Reading it, I can’t help but think that none of this is new. It’s always been about creating good, helpful, real content that is unique to your experiences and expertise. Google says AEO and GEO are still SEO and you can ignore llms.txt, chunking, and special schema. Trying to game Google (or AI tools) often ends up being a short-term gain and a longer-term loss (or worse, penalty). See Lily Ray’s analysis on AI content strategies that backfire.

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+ combined followers on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and Facebook with DA 40+. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 591 sites.

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• Food blogger’s ‘glass-like’ fried chicken goes viral

• 80 worst food photos

social media

• Instagram cracks down on content aggregators

seo & business

• Building a food blogging team

• Blocking AI crawlers cost publishers 7% of traffic

• Q1 2026 state of search report

This week, beginning on May 6, Meta purged millions of bot, spam, and inactive Instagram accounts, wiping out lots of followers all at once, so all the stats are in a bit of flux. Buzzfeed’s Tasty lost almost half a million followers on Instagram, Jamie Oliver lost 83K, and Feel Good Foodie lost 24K, for example. It’s not just you! The in-depth Instagram charts introduced last week will return once things settle.

Inspired Taste surveyed 2,000 Americans about their cooking habits and found that home cooks are 300% more likely to turn to food blogs than AI for recipe inspiration, and 125% more likely to use physical cookbooks than AI.

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• How to write a cookbook proposal and land a book deal

• 12 top Australian food blogs

• 5 things the most successful creators do differently, according to Kit

• Happy Horse brings recipes to life on video

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This week I’ve created a lot of new Instagram charts for you! The average number of Instagram posts/reels by a top food blogger in the past week was 4 and the most popular time to add those was 10 AM – 12PM Eastern. 54% of those posts/reels contain a call-to-action indicating the use of an auto-DM reply tool like Grocers List or ManyChat.

100daysofrealfood was the most active creator with 59 posts/reels, while chelseasmessyapron had the most comments overall, nearly 30,000 comments! kidfriendly.meals saw the highest engagement rates, averaging nearly 5,000 comments per post/reel, and buzzfeedtasty had for the single most viral hit of the week with a reel ranking Korean Fried Chicken that reached over 110,000 likes.

If you find this analysis valuable, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ combined followers on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and Facebook. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 588 sites.

Cover: Cinco de Mayo

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• Pinterest changes

• AI search and the fight for fair traffic

• ChatGPT citation study

• Someone planted backdoors in dozens of WordPress plug-ins used in thousands of websites

Summer has officially climbed to number six in the recipe categories, while spring has dropped to number seven. Chicken remains the most popular ingredient, but chocolate has moved up to number two. New ingredient entries this week include mayo, parmesan, corn, and tofu.

Easy is still the top adjective used by creators. Six new adjectives entered the top twenty this week: grilled, perfect, fried, simple, smoked, and gluten free.

On social media, kidfriendly.meals was instagram’s biggest mover with an increase of 12K followers. Crowded kitchen and over the fire cooking dominated facebook growth with 14K and 13K new followers respectively. Among rising stars, alidaryder led percentage growth at 9.2%.

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

Rachel

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Fiber is about to trend

Half of Americans say it’s hard to afford food

social media

• Instagram’s “link in bio” may end

• You can now edit Instagram comments

seo & ai

• Google’s Mueller on SEO gurus who are “clueless imposters”

• AllSpice thinks AI can save recipe blogs

• Google’s March update finishes rolling out

• Raptive encourages blocking AI bots

I’ve just released a new chart featuring the food blogs with the largest recipe collections. Tasty.co takes the top spot, and the average top food blog now hosts approximately 1,000 recipes!

Spring flavors are dominating other charts this week. Lemon and strawberry have surged into the top ten ingredients, while chicken remains the most popular protein. “Easy” continues to be the top-performing descriptor, joined by newcomers like quick, cheesy, and no-bake. Spring and summer have both climbed into the top ten categories as readers pivot toward warmer weather.

kidfriendly.meals was the week’s big winner on Instagram with +15K followers. alidaryder saw massive growth at +22.4%, with mamagourmand and fantabulosity_blog also posting strong gains.

The data suggests brevity is essential right now. The most successful titles average just five words, and the peak posting window is between 8 PM and 11 PM Eastern. Because only 33% of blogs were active this week, staying on your publishing schedule is an easy way to stand out.

If you find this analysis valuable, please consider sharing this Substack.

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with a Moz Domain Authority of 40+ and 100K+ combined followers on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and Facebook. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 585 sites.

Cover: National Garlic Day, April 19

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• 2026 James Beard Awards finalists

• Reinventing a food blog after an 80% traffic drop

social media & ai

• Facebook monetisation is back

• How AI is helping food bloggers make their plate shots pop

• Raptive launches an AI tool to turn your content into social-ready assets

seo & tools

• What Raptive learned from Google’s first Discover algorithm update

• CookPal answers cooking questions inside your WP Recipe Maker card

• WordPress 7.0 delayed

You’ll notice we have a fresh new cover style this week to match some important updates behind the scenes.

I’ve refined my data criteria to ensure we are looking at the true “top tier” of the industry. To be included in our tracking, a site must now have a Moz Domain Authority of 40+, a combined social media following of 100K+, and run Raptive ads. By tightening these parameters, we’re now tracking a focused group of 585 elite sites, allowing for much sharper analysis in an increasingly crowded market.

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 a Moz Domain Authority of 40+ and 100K+ combined followers on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and Facebook. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded.

Cover: National Pecan Day, April 1

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• 2026 World Championship Cheese Contest

• California considers a ‘not ultraprocessed’ food label

• Five pizza trends

• AI raising the stakes in functional ingredient formulation

• The most innovative food companies of 2026

blogging & business

• Food blogger earnings

• Smart ways for food bloggers to use AI

• Using AI to eliminate busywork

• Raptive’s new AI workflow tool

• AI overviews threaten creator income

seo & search

• Google March 2026 spam update

• Why ‘search everywhere’ is the new reality for SEO

• Why zero-click search doesn’t mean zero influence

• ChatGPT citations favour a small group of domains

• Google launches Search Live globally

tools & platforms

• Pinterest’s new Pin promotion

• YouTube’s new Shopping affiliate program

Hello!

Naturally, Easter is front and center this week. It’s climbed to #4 in recipe categories, and carrots holding strong at #3 in ingredients, ham rising to #5, and eggs making a brand new entry at #7. Chocolate stays loyal at #4, and strawberry is climbing fast at #8. On the descriptor side, “vegan,” “healthy,” and “sweet” are all trending up. Five new adjectives entered the top 20 this week: spicy, classic, simple, mini, and keto.

On social, the_pastaqueen was Instagram’s biggest mover by far with an extraordinary +103K, and miguelscookingwithfire dominated Facebook with +81K. Among rising stars, nickskitchen led percentage growth at +10.2%, with ryannordheimer at +5.3% and fantabulosity_blog at +4.7% close behind.

If you find this analysis valuable, please consider sharing this Substack.

Have a wonderful Easter,
Rachel

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ combined followers on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and Facebook. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 984 sites.

Cover: Easter Sunday

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• Beef tallow is trending

• Six new food books

• 58% of Americans listen to podcasts monthly

seo & ai

• Small publisher search traffic 60% down over two years

• Google tests AI-written titles in Search

• WordPress.com lets AI write and publish posts

• Google developing opt-out of AI features in search

tools & strategy

• Laughing Spatula’s road to 1 million pageviews

• Dad What Cooks’s systems to grow traffic

• Instagram tests clickable links in posts