I built my first website in Notepad and Dreamweaver (when it was owned by Macromedia) with no real idea what I was doing. It had a tiled background, a visitor counter that I'm fairly sure I set to start at 400, a midi playing in the background, and a page of links to other people's sites. It was hideous… but it was also mine, and looking back with nostalgia, building it was one of the most enjoyable things I've done with a computer.
Fast forward to now, and making a website in 2026 is a compliance exercise. You do keyword research first, because building something nobody searches for is considered a rookie error. You check for “search intent.” You add the schema markup, the table of contents, the FAQ block, the author bio establishing credentials, the keyword optimization. You demonstrate experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, because Google publishes a rubric with those four words in it and everyone building a website now wants to have a high search ranking.
Somewhere in there all the fun and personality disappeared.
The web used to be full of weirdos… and personality
The early web was mostly people making things for no real reason. Someone's random exhaustive page hosted on Geocities about lighthouses. A Star Wars fan site with light saber gifs, which took minutes to load on your 56k modem. You had webrings, which were literally just a chain of neighbors pointing at each other because they liked each other's sites. You learned HTML by hitting view-source on a page you liked and copying and editing.
None of it was optimized because there was nothing to optimize for. You found sites through a friend who shared it to via AOL IM (instant messenger), a forum post, a link at the bottom of another random site. Every page looked like a specific person made it, because a specific person did make it, and they had no Google rules telling them what a page is supposed to look like with authority signals.
Why every recipe site is the same
Google won, and winning meant that for about twenty years, traffic and search were the same word. If you wanted anyone to see your website, you needed to rank, and if you needed to rank you needed to build whatever Google's systems rewarded.
You had to follow the rules and “optimize for SEO.” There was just one door ruled by one behemoth, and everyone reshaped their house around the door.
Page speed became a signal, so everyone chased the performance scores to be in the green. Mobile-friendliness became a signal. Long-form content did better, so posts started getting longer. Structured data helped you show up as a rich result, so everyone added structured data (which Google then removed). Now everything looks and almost sounds the same, because if a thousand sites optimize for Google's SEO playbook, they end up looking and sounding like each other.
The recipe blog is the example everyone reaches for, and it deserves the reputation. A thousand words about a grandmother in Tuscany before you get to read about the ingredients and what goes in the oven.
People assume that's writers being self-indulgent but it isn't. A recipe itself, the ingredients and the steps, can't be copyrighted, so anyone can just take it, but the story around it is unique. Meanwhile longer pages held attention better in the metrics that mattered, and a page someone actually reads through outranks one they bounce off. The life story is armor and it's a signal at the same time. It's a rational response to the rubric, repeated by everyone in the niche so they can rank high on Google.
Google keeps saying it doesn't want this
Google's own documentation says to "focus on creating people-first content to be successful with Google Search, rather than search engine-first content made primarily to gain search engine rankings." The company also states that "while E-E-A-T itself isn't a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T is useful."
So what everybody is doing isn't a ranking factor, and the advice is to stop writing for the algorithm, from the company whose algorithm is the reason anyone writes for the algorithm. But people who create people first content seem to not be doing well on Google search. So they change it to try to do well on Google's algorithm, it's always about the traffic.
We're following the same playbook… somewhat
Look at this site, we're not innocent here. There's a key points box at the top of most posts. There's a sources section at the bottom. We link internally between related posts and we think about what people search for before we write. I've written a post about how to optimize for AI search, but more so than Google, we're trying to optimize for AI citations as Google will just show the big players at the top of their search results anyways.
The door is closing anyway
Twenty years of everyone building their site around the one big entrance, and now the entrance is being bricked up from the inside. AI Overviews answer the question at the top of the page and most searches now end without a click at all.
All that optimization was rent paid to a landlord who is increasingly deciding to stop letting visitors through. The template still continues but the traffic it was built to capture doesn't.
Which leaves an odd opening. If ranking for a search that never sends a click is worth less every day, then the reason to file the personality off your site is weakening too. The things that get a site cited by an AI, or bookmarked, or sent to a friend, are a real point of view, numbers nobody else has, and being recognizably a specific person. Which is what sites had before any of us learned the rubric.
My first site had a visitor counter I inflated by four hundred. Nobody who saw it was sent by a search engine.
Sources
Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content - The people-first guidance, the definition of E-E-A-T as experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and Google's statement that E-E-A-T is not itself a specific ranking factor.
