# How to Grow a Blog in the Age of AI Agents

Google sends fewer clicks, and AI makes cheap content free. How to grow a blog with real contributors instead, without tripping Google's spam rules.

By Steven Cappiello, Founder of JobKick · Published 2026-10-09 · Updated 2026-10-15
Canonical: https://jobkick.com/blog/growing-a-blog-in-the-age-of-ai-agents/
Topics: grow a blog, guest contributors, scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse, AI overviews traffic, blog growth strategy, 90-9-1 rule

This blog is a couple of weeks old. Earlier this week I wrote down an idea: "Let people sign up to apply for affiliate editor / submitter status by providing their x.com or LinkedIn or blog, or post their web site or app somehow. Let's grow this thing organically and in the SMARTEST way ever."

Nothing like that exists here yet. Before building it, I wanted to know what "smart" actually means right now, when search engines send fewer people your way, AI can write a thousand posts before lunch, and a growing share of your visitors aren't people at all. Here's what I found.

![A bold woodcut-style print of a newspaper boy in a cap, reading a large open newspaper, with a horse-drawn cab behind him.](/blog/growing-a-blog-in-the-age-of-ai-agents/newspaper-boy.webp)

*William Nicholson, "Newspaper Boy," from* London Types, *1898. Color lithograph. [Cleveland Museum of Art](https://clevelandart.org/art/2010.619), open access (CC0).*

## The old deal is shrinking

The deal used to be simple. You write something useful, Google sends readers. That deal still exists, but it pays less.

- **8% vs 15%** of Google visits ended in a click on a regular result when an AI summary appeared, vs. when none did (source: Pew Research Center 2025 · 900 US adults, 68,879 searches, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/)
- **1%** of visits to a results page with an AI summary ended in a click on a link inside the summary (source: Pew Research Center 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/)
- **−33%** Google organic search traffic to 2,500+ news sites, Nov 2024 to Nov 2025 (−38% in the US) (source: Reuters Institute 2026, Chartbeat data, https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/journalism-media-and-technology-trends-and-predictions-2026)

Pew tracked the real browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025, so this is what people did, not what they said they'd do. The Chartbeat numbers are for news sites, and the Reuters Institute is careful to say "it is not clear how much of this is down to AI overviews." Still, the 280 digital leaders it surveyed expect search traffic to "almost halve (−43%) over the next three years." That's a forecast from a non-representative sample, not a fact. But it's the mood.

So if search alone won't grow a new blog, what will?

## The tempting shortcut, and why it backfires

The obvious move is volume. AI makes posts nearly free, so publish a lot of them. Or open the doors and let anyone post anything, as long as it links back to them.

Google has a name for both, and both are in its spam policies.

**Scaled content abuse** is "when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users," which Google says covers unoriginal content "no matter how it's created." AI isn't the offense. Using it to flood the zone is.

**Site reputation abuse** is the open-doors version: third-party pages published "with little or no first-party oversight or involvement," riding on the host site's reputation. Google's own example of what's fine is a freelancer's article that is clearly attributed and fits the site. The problem isn't outside writers. It's outside writers nobody edits.

And **link spam** includes paid "links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases." A guest post that exists to pass a link is the oldest trick there is.

Google says it means it. After its March 2024 update, it reported "45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in search results versus the 40% improvement we expected." That's Google grading its own homework, but the direction is clear.

## Real growth comes from a few people who care a lot

If you can't win by volume, you win with people. Here's the catch: most readers will never write a word.

Usability researcher Jakob Nielsen called it the 90-9-1 rule in 2006: 90% of people in an online community just read, 9% contribute now and then, and 1% do most of the contributing. It started as an observation. A 2014 study in the *Journal of Medical Internet Research* tested it on four health support communities with 63,990 members and 578,349 posts:

**Chart (bars): Who wrote the posts** — Share of all posts in four online health communities, by how active each member was. Weighted average across the four sites.

```json
{"unit":"%","highlight":"Top 1% of members","rows":[{"label":"Top 1% of members","value":74.7,"note":"59.0% to 75.0% on individual sites"},{"label":"Next 9%","value":24.0,"note":"23.8% to 37.4% on individual sites"},{"label":"Remaining 90%","value":1.3,"note":"1.1% to 7.8% on individual sites"}]}
```

Source: van Mierlo (2014), "The 1% Rule in Four Digital Health Social Networks," JMIR 16(2):e33 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3939180/).

Health forums aren't blogs, so take the exact numbers loosely. The shape is the point. A contributor program won't turn readers into writers in bulk. It finds the handful who already want to write, and gives them a reason to do it here.

Nielsen's advice for living with this still holds up: make contributing easier, reward contributors without over-rewarding them, and promote the good ones instead of treating every post the same.

## A trust ladder instead of an open door

Put those together and you get something like a ladder. Nobody jumps to the top. Each rung earns the next.

1. **Read and react.** Comments and reader questions. (Both already exist here: comments are signed in and moderated, and reader questions go into the same queue as my own ideas.)
2. **Apply with who you are.** Your x.com, LinkedIn, blog, or the site or app you built. That's the part of my original idea I'd keep exactly as written. A real public trail is the cheapest trust signal there is.
3. **Submit a post.** It gets edited like any other post on the site, carries a real byline, and fits what the blog is about. Google's guidance on bylines is plain: add "accurate authorship information," and don't fabricate creator profiles with "AI-generated headshots, made-up names, or false credentials."
4. **Earn better links.** Google suggests marking links in user content with `rel="ugc"` (a label that tells search engines "a user added this"), and says you can drop it for "members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time." That's a ladder built into the search rules.
5. **Become an editor.** For the few who keep showing up, help review what others submit.

The bar at every rung is the same question Google asks of any page: why does this exist? Its answer is that content should be made "primarily to help people." A contributor whose post would be worth reading with the links removed is one you want.

## Where AI agents fit

I covered the plumbing in [How People Find Your App](/blog/how-people-find-your-apps/): llms.txt, Markdown copies of each post, an MCP server (a standard way for AI assistants to query a site). Short version: today they bring little traffic. I'd still build for agents, but as a reader you serve, not a growth engine. The growth engine is people.

## The fair counterpoint

A contributor program is work. Every submission needs reading, editing and saying no to, and a bad post with your name on the site costs more than no post at all. Plenty of great blogs are one person, writing well, for years.

Big publishers are trying it anyway. The Reuters Institute report describes the Washington Post's Ripple project, which offers outside writers, "including independent substackers," a place on its site and app with a revenue share. But they have editors. A small blog has to be honest about how many submissions it can actually review.

Where I land: open the door slowly, with a small ladder, and only as fast as someone can edit what comes through it.

## If you're growing a blog right now

1. **Don't chase volume.** Fewer, better posts beat a flood. Google's spam rules are aimed squarely at the flood.
2. **Own a direct line to readers.** An email list, comments, a way to send in questions. Search and AI summaries can change overnight. Those can't.
3. **Find your 1%.** Look at who comments, replies and shares. Ask them directly before you build a form.
4. **Ask for a real identity.** A LinkedIn, an x.com or a site of their own. Real bylines, no invented personas.
5. **Edit everything that goes out under your name.** That's the line between a guest post and site reputation abuse.
6. **Label links honestly.** `rel="ugc"` for contributor links, `rel="sponsored"` for anything paid, and loosen it only for people who've earned it.
7. **Serve the agents, but count the humans.** Make clean pages that machines can read, then measure success by people who come back.

That's the plan as I see it today. Would you write for a blog like this one? What would make it worth your time, and what would put you off? Tell me in the comments.

## Sources

- Pew Research Center (July 2025), [Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/). Browsing data from 900 US adults, March 2025; 68,879 searches.
- Reuters Institute (January 2026), [Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/journalism-media-and-technology-trends-and-predictions-2026). Survey of 280 digital leaders in 51 countries and territories (not representative); traffic data from Chartbeat, 2,500+ sites.
- Google Search Central, [Spam policies for Google web search](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies).
- Google Search Central Blog (March 2024), [What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies).
- Google (March 2024, updated April 2024), [New updates to address spam and low-quality results](https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-update-march-2024/).
- Google Search Central, [Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content).
- Google Search Central, [Qualify your outbound links to Google](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/qualify-outbound-links).
- Nielsen, J. (2006), [Participation Inequality: The 90-9-1 Rule for Social Features](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/). Nielsen Norman Group.
- van Mierlo, T. (2014), [The 1% Rule in Four Digital Health Social Networks: An Observational Study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3939180/). *Journal of Medical Internet Research* 16(2):e33. 63,990 members, 578,349 posts.