Best Served Hot: July 5–11, 2026
Hello!
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.
