A VegBlogger update...

Do you wonder what happened to the VegBlogger website? Where did the blog go? Well, let me explain.

I'm Jacqueline, and I started this blog in 2009. I had it for over 16 years, and it had thousands of blog posts. It got a good amount of traffic each month, too. Then, in September 2025, Typepad closed. Typepad hosted my blog (and many other people's blogs) as well. They were around for a long time and decided to let us all know they were calling it quits.

That news left bloggers scrambling to figure out what to do with their blogs, including me. At the time, I had six blogs, with some that got a lot of traffic and had been around for 15 years or more. I had a month to figure out what to do with around 12,000 blog posts between the blogs. I turned my focus to the most popular one, which I make a portion of my income from. This blog always made a little money, but it was never my intention. I'm passionate about vegetarianism and wanted to share my thoughts and related things on here. It was a side hobby that made a few bucks along the way.

Well, it was too costly and confusing, and complicated to try and transfer that many blog posts and get it all right. I made the decision to simply let go of all the blog posts. I wish I could have migrated it all to this new host, but I didn't know how to do it, and hiring someone to do it would have been far too costly. So my intention was to simply carry on and start blogging again. I did that with the other popular blog, and it's been okay, and traffic is slowly coming back. I continue with that one because I have paid local advertisers that make it worth the effort.

However, I haven't felt the urge to do it here, and I'll tell you why. It's AI. With the rise of AI, it is really hurting bloggers. It used to be that people would search for things, and then those who had used good SEO and relevant info would rise to the top and get traffic to their website. That's no longer the case. As more people simply read the AI recap at the top of the search results, they are no longer, in most cases, going to the websites, which has left content creators seeing their website traffic fall off a cliff. Plus, some people now use AI to write blog posts that we all used to sit down and write. What took us 30 minutes now takes AI less than a minute.

The problem is that content writers/bloggers are simply feeding the AI machine. AI pulls its information from what's online, which is what bloggers and content producers are creating. It uses their info, but is no longer sending traffic to their website, which means the person isn't making money anymore, or nearly as much. So why write the posts only to feed the AI machine? That's what has kept me from starting this blog all over. I feel like it makes no sense to write all the posts for the AI machine to use to give people a recap at the top of the search results. There's literally no point in blogging if people are not going to go directly to your URL (and most people find you through the search engine on this type of blog). It's a sad situation, but that's where we are. Things change and this is just one of them.

I loved writing this blog for nearly 16 years. I shared recipes (without the annoying cookie-cutter format others use), shared my experience in raising two vegetarian kids, and shared topics and thoughts that were related to vegetarianism. I enjoyed it a lot. Anyway, I just wanted to post something to let people know what happened, in the event someone came to the page and wondered. I did have followers, and some have contacted me to inquire about why my website has changed and the content has basically disappeared.

Feel free to drop me a line if you have feedback on this. I can be reached at jbodnarwriter@gmail.com

Peace to all,
Jacqueline :)