Best Served Hot: June 7–13, 2026
749 new posts were published by the top 526 food blogs this week.
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.
