For more than a decade, food bloggers could predict and rely on holiday traffic. Not this year. AI answers are replacing vetted recipes, cutting off creators’ main revenue streams, and confusing home cooks with stitched-together instructions that don’t always make sense. Google’s AI Overviews now surface blended cooking steps from multiple bloggers, often above the links/sources they draw from. Many food creators reported between 30% and 80% drops in Google traffic, with some calling this their worst holiday season yet. Meanwhile, AI-generated recipe slop is flooding Pinterest, Facebook, and Etsy, blurring the line between human-tested dishes and AI-invented food. Google told Bloomberg that AI Overviews are “a helpful starting point” and that people still click through to real recipes. Bloggers said the opposite:
• 40% year-over-year decline: Eb Gargano’s recipe traffic cratered, replaced by AI summaries that even get basics wrong – like baking a 6in Christmas cake for three to four hours. “You’d end up with charcoal!”
• “Frankenstein recipes”: Adam Gallagher of Inspired Taste said Google mixes his ingredients with competitors’ instructions, even for brand-name searches. His cocktail click-through rate has decreased by 30%.
• Gemini 3’s new interactive recipe graphics remix creators’ photos, a move Gallagher said crosses into “plagiarized AI recipes.” Sarah Leung of The Woks of Life said AI summaries dominate searches for Chinese ingredients, often pulling directly from their years of reference work while giving users little reason to click. Also:
• Multiple bloggers found AI-run sites cloning their entire catalogs, rewriting instructions, tweaking photos, and even generating synthetic images of their families.
• Carrie Forrest of Clean Eating Kitchen said she lost 80% of her traffic and revenue in two years, forcing her to lay off her team. This Thanksgiving, more people will trust AI with their menus, even when the results defy basic kitchen science. Meanwhile, the creators who built the modern recipe web say they’re becoming invisible inside the very tools powered by their work.