Here’s a blog status update post for March 2026.
Site traffic: still largely from Google; AI searches (unfortunately) also showing up
Looking over roughly the past three months’ worth of site traffic (December 1 to February 28), a plurality of 49.1% of visits come from search engines, nearly all of it Google. “Direct entry” (as Matomo calls it) comes in at 47.6%; I assume it’s visitors arriving via my newsletter, typing in the address, or having it bookmarked?
Social media clocks in at 1.2%. The top five social networks (and only ones with at least double digit numbers): Reddit, Bluesky, Facebook, Mastodon, and YouTube. Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and TikTok make single-digit appearances. (LinkedIn’s particularly disappointing, given I’m currently using it as part of job search efforts.)
At just under 1% are AI assistants and websites (tied at 0.8% each) and “campaigns” (0.4%). While I’ve done my best to try to block AI bots from this site, I’m not surprised it’s not completely working; AI companies likely aren’t too concerned about things like obeying robots.txt files.
Giving Instagram another try
Elsewhere in social media news, I’ve decided to give Instagram another go. Not out of any love for Meta or anything, but I felt I needed at least one “mainstream” social network, much as I prefer using my mainstays, Mastodon and Bluesky. I still have my Pixelfed account for photos—the fediverse equivalent of Instagram—but it’s infrequently updated these days.
After considering all of the options (from Facebook to TikTok), I settled on Instagram; it seems to be the least terrible option, if I have to use something owned by questionable right-wing billionaires. I wanted something mainstream (versus a more niche purpose like LinkedIn), not completely useless (Facebook pages), has a diverse user base (versus my experience with Reddit), not a “Nazi bar” (Twitter), and doesn’t require making video or audio (TikTok, YouTube).
Anyway, I’ll likely just use Instagram to highlight when I have new blog posts. If anyone’s interested in following me on there, here’s my Instagram page.
