I have two blogs that used to do amazingly and now they don't do anything in terms of traffic or earnings.

I am wondering if something happened in the last 5 or 6 years that could have caused this. Everything was looking up and increasing on my sites and then out of nowhere, they tanked!

Google started rolling out major algorithm updates around 2020-2021 which hit content sites hard. Then the Helpful Content Update in 2022 destroyed a lot of sites that were doing well before.

AI overviews and featured also snippets now steal clicks that used to go to blogs.

Check your Google Search Console and look at which queries tanked. That will tell you exactly what changed.

7 hours ago, Sara said:

Google started rolling out major algorithm updates around 2020-2021 which hit content sites hard. Then the Helpful Content Update in 2022 destroyed a lot of sites that were doing well before.

This. I know this was a factor for me. AI made everything a lot worse following these changes. I think they were making these changes to anticipate for AI but also because of everything happening in the world at the time. They were trying to safeguard for misinformation. It just ended up hurting so many of us.