Hello!
For the first time, I’m offering a complimentary 20-minute website review through cre8d design. If you’ve been wondering what could be improved on your food blog, from design and usability to speed and conversions, I’d love to take a look. Book a free review with me.
The Stats
Thanksgiving and Christmas recipes are climbing the rankings, with turkey, cranberry, and sweet potato all moving up.
Crowded Kitchen had another impressive week on socials, gaining 24K IG and 70K FB followers!
38% didn’t publish any new posts this week, and the average was just 1.6 posts. Thursday was the most popular publishing day, with weekends much quieter. How often are you publishing new recipes at the moment? I’d love to hear from you.
News Roundup
Raptive reports food search traffic fell 19% year-over-year in October, while overall pageviews dropped 8%. AI Overviews appeared for 91% of 116K tracked food keywords, up from 60% in September. Non-search traffic grew 12%. See their recommendations.
An Instagram Reels study of 22,700 beauty posts offers tactics worth testing for food: say and display the exact recipe name in the first few seconds, show close-ups of the food, and ask specific questions to encourage comments.
Put Instagram comment-to-DM prompts in the first 40 characters of captions, recommends Raptive, so they’re visible without tapping ‘more’.
The Modern Proper shares its Substack strategy on Food Blogger Pro: promote paid subscriptions through Instagram and TikTok, keep SEO recipes on your blog, and save recipes without search demand for Substack.
ChatGPT is approaching 20% of Google’s search query volume, according to a recent estimate, although the two aren’t directly comparable.
ChatGPT is developing analytics that could let food bloggers track how often their sites appear in AI answers and how many visitors click through.
Meta has paused plans to crawl advertisers’ websites for AI-related uses following publisher backlash and legal challenges.
Instagram Edits is coming to Mac, offering a desktop alternative to CapCut.
Rachel
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 504 sites.
