Best Served Hot: May 17–23, 2026

Hello!

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.

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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.