These are such weird times.
On the one hand, I’ve never been more excited to be a travel blogger. Looking back at my decade-plus of sharing travel advice I feel like I’m now truly hitting my stride. In so many ways, I couldn’t be more proud or happier doing what I do.
At the same time, I look at what’s happening all around the internet and I just want to throw my arms up. So many things are shifting in ways I find deeply troubling — as a content creator, but also just as a person using the internet.
So, alright… let me take a break from writing travel guides and rant here for a bit.
My issue is mainly, and predictably, with AI.
I’m not against the technology itself, which I regularly use for coding and editing assistance. My issue is with the ways that silicon valley is deploying AI so carelessly and without respect for the original work that fuels their models.
As an independent content creator doing the hard work of actually creating original work, I increasingly find myself in an unfair position. Suddenly, I’m competing directly with Google (market cap: 2 trillion), which is putting AI answers where previously Indie Traveller (market cap: lmao) provided an answer based on actual experience and expertise.
These AI texts are generated using content stolen from sites like mine. While no one would claim that the ‘top 5 things to do in X’ are in any way proprietary information (it’s fine… AI can have this), I’ve seen very specific tips getting clearly ripped off from blogs, robbing them of their unique value. Google has even had the audacity to put visuals that I hand-created for this blog as an illustration next to their AI answers. And there is nothing I can do about it.
As you can imagine, I’m not thrilled.
What’s probably not so widely appreciated is that creating even a single travel guide can be very costly. Some posts you can read here on Indie Traveller have had hundreds or even thousands of Dollars/Euros poured into them when all is added up — while being available for free, ad-supported. That business model is increasingly being eroded. I’m worried that at some point it may disappear.
A question arises: if all the content on the internet is there just to be stripmined by Big Tech, who will still want to create original content?
And will Google still send people to external sites anyway?
If the current situation represents some kind of endpoint, this could still be somewhat acceptable: AI can provide the basic outlines, while blogs provide the details and personal perspectives. Fair enough. Unfortunately, this is probably not the endpoint Big Tech has in mind. Many see Google’s new AI Mode as representing its future: that it will become an answer machine (I remind you: based on pirated content!) that no longer sends any people onto the open web. (No, citations that no one clicks don’t count.)
Google keeping more and more of the screen to itself, leaving less to outgoing links. In the future, there may be no links at all apart from some citations — as is already the case in AI Mode.
This would be devastating for any content creators. According to recent studies, AI has already reduced clickthroughs from Google to the web by about 30-50%. If people stop clicking through to the source altogether we will be deprived of any ad revenue and that would mean most of us would have to throw in the towel. (Ironically, this will make it harder in the future for tech companies to get high-quality data for their models.)
Mind you, I know that my content is far more in-depth, personal, and accurate than the typical answers an AI can ever generate. If you’ve played around with AI at all you will know it delivers mostly surface-level answers, which makes sense as it’s based on the most common datapoints on a topic. However, my concern is that this won’t really matter if the big platforms force their own AI content onto their users and always make it the default.
But… this rant is not just about me and my business. I feel like just a lot of things are going in a direction I absolutely do not like.
Such as: an unprecedented commoditization and devaluation of culture. Yes, it’s pretty cool to turn any picture into a still frame from a Studio Ghibli film (as openAI now lets you do) but a million of those later and it’s no longer OK. A distinct art style and craft developed over decades has now been reduced to a cheap and disposable meme. Miyazaki never asked to be hyperscaled.
I’m worried about AI replacing the human touch. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was recently asked about the loneliness epidemic caused by social media. If you thought that was a problem at all, well, you really shouldn’t have worried. You see, Meta will create friends for you. AI friends.
What… are you even serious?
Are we just trapped inside a Black Mirror episode?
AI seems to be this vortex sucking up everything in its path. I wonder: are we spinning towards a brighter future or just circling around the drain?
With all the infinite scrolling, addiction loops, and AI slop, the internet has become a terrible place. According to a recent study, almost half of young people in the UK would prefer a world without internet — and I can’t say I’m surprised.
I hate the algorithmification of everything. And I hate how so much is fake now.
With all this on my mind, I’ve been thinking a lot about where I want to go from here as a blogger. And if there’s anything good to come out of this, I can at least say that it’s giving me some new clarity of purpose.
How I’m adapting
There is a hidden beach south of Lisbon that I like to go to when I just need some time to think. It’s a wild beach reached by a steep hiking trail and surrounded by tall limestone cliffs. I go there for a swim, to stare at the undulating waves, or to look for small creatures in the tide pools among the rocks. It’s during this time that I ponder where I want to take my blogging next.
(In the corporate world this is probably called an “offsite strategy session”. In my case it’s just a meeting between myself and maybe a couple of crabs.)
On one such beach session two years ago, I felt there was a different wind blowing. I decided I should specialize, increase quality, and double down on authenticity. It’s when I started my YouTube channel and spun some of my popular guides off into smaller niche sites. I’m glad I did because I now feel I need to triple down on this approach.
As the internet gets increasingly artificial, I want to go in the opposite direction. This is something I’ve wanted to make a lot clearer, so my about page and sidebars now state explicitly that the travel guides you read here are based on realtrips and written by realpeople. It’s kind of crazy that that has to be said at all, but here we are.
During recent site renovations I also took a hard look at some of my older content. To be honest, as much as bloggers like to complain about AI slop, we have been a little sloppy sometimes too. For a while, SEO consultants had convinced me that quantity was as important as quality, which led to some highly search-query-focused posts that weren’t among my best work. I deleted about 40 such posts so I could start with a clean slate. Hitting that delete button felt good.
I know what kind of content I don’t like (it’s what’s flooding every platform right now), so I believe my only move is to make content that is not that. Indie Traveller is all about authentic, in-depth travel guides that you can’t get from AI. While that may not guarantee visibility on platforms that are getting drunk on AI, there may still be enough readers who actively seek out such content. (If you’re a writer and want to join the rebellion, I’m still hiring.)
I hope that readers like you will continue to value content directly from the source, made by people who have actually been there. If that proves to be not the case, then it will take a lot more hidden beach sessions for me to figure out some other way of making a living — but I hope I’m right to bet on this even as the creator ecosystem changes around me.
Travel is real
Besides making me reassess my focus on quality, the increasingly artificial internet has led me to another realization: I’m grateful that the topic I deal with every day is so radically anchored to reality.
When surveys say that people wish for a world without the internet, I don’t think they really want a world without technology. They surely just crave having more unmediated experiences, more genuine connection, and less scroll addiction. Perhaps they also miss the joy of discovering something for yourself rather than getting it served up by an algorithm that is hyper-optimized to mine your attention.
Well, travel offers all those things.
Sure, there are some who travel halfway around the world only to stare again at a glowing rectangle. Some travellers obsess only about how their trip will look online rather than actually living it.
But for the most part, travel is a full-contact sport. It’s impossible to travel and not to be engaging with the here and now. To have any sort of meaningful trip you simply have to explore, to talk to people, and to find out for yourself. If part of my job is encouraging people to have more such experiences, that’s actually kind of awesome.
To disillusioned young people who wish they’d grown up in an age before mobile internet, I say: go travel. Throw a dart at a map and go, because chances are your trip will make you forget your phone. At least, for me travel is one of the best ways I know to deeply reconnect with the world around you and yourself, at least in some temporary form.
Far away from all the machine-programmed addiction loops, you can enjoy some well-earned dopamine from actual connection and discovery. Yes, the good kind of dopamine — that organic, whole grain version that is so easy to neglect in this ocean of dopamine junk food.
To me, travel represents something radical, authentic, and human. As more and more layers of artifice are slathered onto our lives, it feels like that could be important.
Maybe that sounds a bit grand — I don’t know. But given the uncertain future of blogging, I could use a bit of a guiding philosophy. If travel can in some small way be an antidote to some of the problems, then maybe that can be my mission.
Luckily I can say that despite a very challenging environment, Indie Traveller is still doing fine financially. Somehow, I’m managing to sail against the wind. However, not every travel blogger is in a good spot right now and I know many have already quit.
I know that many people think of travel blogging as a dream job and in some ways it is. Of all the livelihoods that AI may be disrupting, surely no one is saying “oh no, think of the travel bloggers!”. However, I think our work would be missed if it becomes too difficult for us to share our knowledge with the travel community in a way that would justify the expense involved.
Anyway, whoof…
Lots of thoughts are swirling through my mind these days, which I wanted to at least take a moment to share. While things are changing at a breakneck pace, I do believe such changes also usually trigger a counter-reaction, which I’m hoping will begin to emerge.
So here’s what I’m asking: next time you’re planning a trip, skip the AI summary and click through to the actual source. Read the work of someone who’s actually been there, gotten lost, made mistakes, and wants to share what they learned. Because every click is a small vote for keeping the internet human.
If you want to follow along with me in an algorithms-free way, consider subscribing to my newsletter, YouTube channel, or if you’re an old-school internet user, my RSS feed.
P.S. If you like AI answers, that’s fair — but you can also disable AI search results on Google if you want. Just add “&udm=14” to any search address. Here’s a tutorial on how to make a search bookmark that will deliver just pure search results the way it used to be.
P.P.S. If you’re a site owner, install Cloudflare and enable ‘Block AI Bots’. This will prevent your content from being used for model creation. That’s not a complete solution, but it’s at least some form of defense. When enabled, you will still rank on Google and get cited by AIs.
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