Reinventing a Food Blog After an 80% Traffic Drop with Carrie Forrest from Clean Eating Kitchen

Mar 31, 2026

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What happens when SEO stops working, rebuilding after a major traffic drop, and navigating AI and the future of blogging with Carrie Forrest from Clean Eating Kitchen.

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Welcome to episode 564 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Carrie Forrest from Clean Eating Kitchen.

Reinventing a Food Blog After an 80% Traffic Drop

Carrie Forrest has been blogging since 2009 and has experienced the full range of highs and lows that come with building an online business. When Bjork first interviewed her in 2018, she was already growing Clean Eating Kitchen with simple, healthy recipes and a strong foundation in SEO and keyword research.

Between 2022 and 2024, that strategy paid off in a big way — Carrie grew her site from a few hundred thousand monthly pageviews to nearly one million. But with the rollout of AI Overviews, many of the keyword-driven and how-to posts she relied on were hit hard, leading to an 80% traffic drop almost overnight.

In this episode, Carrie shares how she's navigating this rebuild season — from leaning into her email list and YouTube to focusing on what AI can't replicate: human connection, empathy, and transformation. It's an honest conversation about the shifting landscape for online creators and what reinvention can look like after years of success.

Three episode takeaways:

Why it can be difficult to diversify when one strategy is working extremely well — We talk all the time about the importance of diversifying your revenue and traffic streams, but that can be hard to do in reality! Carrie talks about why she struggled to listen to that advice and how hard it is to focus energy on diversifying when your current strategy is doing so well.
How Carrie is approaching a rebuild season after an 80% drop in traffic — Bjork and Carrie discuss the ebbs and flows of running an online business, how Carrie recovers from big traffic dips, and how a beginner mindset is helping her feel more creative than ever before.
Why focusing on human connection, creativity, and audience relationships matters more than ever — Carrie shares her current outlook for her blog and explains why she is leaning into her humanity and connection with her audience instead of information and transaction.

Resources:

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This episode is sponsored by Yoast and Clariti.

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