RSS Feeds Send Me More Traffic Than Google
blog blogging meta statistics · 12 comments · 500 words · Viewed ~13,155 times
Yeah yeah, I know, data-point of 1.
I recently read Susam's blog post where they said that "most of the traffic to my personal website still comes from web feeds" - I wondered if that was true for my site.
I've been writing this blog for a while. I've never much bothered with "aggressive" SEO - I have a fairly semantic layout, all my reviews have metadata, and stuff like that - but I'm not cramming in keywords, using AMP, or whatever other chickens Google requires to be sacrificed for a higher ranking. Nevertheless, I do OK.
Last year, I added a bit of local-only, lightweight statistics-gathering to my blog. I can see which sites people click on to reach mine. Google is right up the top, DuckDuckGo is surprisingly high, Bing is lucky to crack the top 20 on any day. Similarly, I can see how much traffic I get from the Fediverse and BlueSky (Twitter has all but vanished).
A few weeks ago I added RSS and Newsletter tracking. These data are very lossy. If someone is subscribed to my RSS feed and opens a post and their client downloads a lazy-loaded image at the end of the post, I get a hit. For email it's broadly the same. If an email is opened and the tracker image is loaded, I get a hit (although Gmail does obfuscate that somewhat).
I'm not looking for super-accurate numbers (although I do block as many AI crawlers and bots as possible). I'm not creepily following people around the web nor am I trying to sell them anything. I just want a rough idea of where people find me.
Here are my blog's views for the last 28 days.
Some months I get a surge of hits from link aggregators like HN or Reddit. Sometimes I'm linked to from a popular site or cited in academic work. But most of the time I bumble along getting hits from here, there, and everywhere. Nevertheless, it's lovely to see so many people choosing to subscribe0 (for free!) and astonishing that they provide more traffic than a major search engine.
Obviously, these are two very different types of traffic. People who are searching for a specific thing and stumble upon my blog are different from those who decide to like and subscribe.
But, yeah, about 25% of my traffic comes from people who have chosen to subscribe.
I'm just delighted that so many people read my random thoughts.
-
For historic reasons, I have separate Atom and RSS feeds. Perhaps I should consider merging them? But it doesn't take much effort to publish in two subtly different formats. ↩︎
Share this post on…
Voluntary Paywall
Enjoyed this post? Show your support and pay the author.
12 thoughts on “RSS Feeds Send Me More Traffic Than Google”
-
Dr. Dirtbag
@blog Interesting stats -- thanks for posting. I don't trust the numbers I get from my random Wordpress stats plugin, and I don't add tracking pixels to email or RSS (both of which are full feeds, so no need to click through), but Google is a bit over half my visitors and a bit under half page views, with everything else down in the noise. Glancing through the list and mentally aggregating, most people find me through search, with mountain-specific sites coming in second and commercial social networks irrelevant (e.g. five Facebook visits in the last month).
Reply | Reply to original comment on mountains.social 2026-05-05 13:39
-
Gwyn
Clicked in from Feedly, happy rss subscriber here
Reply 2026-05-05 15:28
-
giuspe
came to say the exact same thing (including using Feedly as aggregator), so I'll just +1 this
Reply 2026-05-05 16:40
-
-
Jim Grey
My site's on WordPress.com and I don't believe there's any way for me to track entries from RSS unfortunately -- I'd love to know. But given the nature of my site search drives about 1/3 of pageviews. I write about vintage film cameras a lot and people will find one in Grandpa's closet and go searching and find my review.
Reply 2026-05-05 16:19
-
Michael
You can add a utm parameter to links in RSS feeds which helps with attribution.
Reply 2026-05-07 11:52
-
-
blog.terrygodier.com
Hell yeah. Same.
shkspr.mobi/blog/2026…
Reply | Reply to original comment on 2026-05-05 17:18
-
Andrew
My personal experience is that Google sends me very little traffic these days, so little that when I accidentally blocked their bot from spidering my site recently I thought twice before allowing it again.
Their AI summaries, while often useful, have really destroyed the click-through rates on their search pages.
Most of my traffic comes through either social media (mastodon), RSS, or the occasional spike from hackernews or similar aggregator.
The old incentives to make your site as Google friendly as possibly are completely gone.
Reply 2026-05-05 17:42
-
Chris Short
I'm quite curious about how you're tracking RSS feed usage. Is there a unique image in your feed itself or a query string you're using to track it?
Reply 2026-05-05 19:06
-
@edent
Basically, yes. I have a separate image for RSS, Atom, Email, Web, etc. It is very fuzzy - but good enough for my purposes.
Reply 2026-05-05 19:08
-
-
Wchao
I was came from Openclaw Everyday News, it came from RSS，and RSS from Karpathy's 100 top AI Blog list. AI chose you!
Reply 2026-05-06 03:03
-
I really hope not!
Reply 2026-05-06 10:42
-
-
news.ycombinator.com
RSS Feeds Send Me More Traffic Than Google | Hacker News
Reply | Reply to original comment on 2026-05-07 04:40
-
More comments on Mastodon.
What are your reckons? Cancel reply
All comments are moderated and may not be published immediately. Your email address will not be published.
Comment: See allowed HTML elements:<a href="" title="">
<abbr title="">
<acronym title="">
<b>
<blockquote cite="">
<br>
<cite>
<code>
<del datetime="">
<em>
<i>
<img src="" alt="" title="" srcset="">
<p>
<pre>
<q cite="">
<s>
<strike>
<strong>
Your Name (required):
Your Email (required):
Your Website (optional):
To respond on your own website, write a post which contains a link to this post - then enter the URl of your page here. Learn more about WebMentions.
URL/Permalink of your article