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.

Read more

• 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.

Read more

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.

Read more

• 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).

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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:

Read more

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!

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

• 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

Read more

• 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

Read more

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.

Read more

• 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.

Read more

• 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

Read more

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

Read more

• 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

Read more