Food Blogging News Roundtable: AI Buttons, Instagram Links, and Google Rewriting Your Titles

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Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Welcome back to another food blogging news roundtable. In this roundtable episode, Björk and I are breaking down the biggest stories impacting food creators so that you can stay informed and make smart decisions for your business. From a new marketing report that has some encouraging news for creators who lead with their personality, to a quiet Google experiment that could have big implications for every recipe title you've ever carefully crafted, there's a lot to cover. We'll also dig into the AI button debate, what Instagram's new caption link test means for food bloggers, and how Pinch of Yum approaches testing site changes before rolling them out more broadly. It's a short but sweet episode, so let's just get into it.

Emily, welcome back.

Thank you. Good to be back.

We're going to talk about all things blogging, SEO, the industry of content creation. It's kind of what we do for these news. Roundup podcast articles. What I've found is there's a lot of stuff that I want to read. As a matter of fact, I installed this like read later kind of Chrome extension. And I would say my, the number of articles that I go back and read is probably 1 to 99. What I found it to be most valuable for is like not reading a bunch of articles in the middle of the day. So I'll like save it for later and then I never actually end up reading them.

Yeah.

Uh, so this is number one, a good chance for me to read through articles. Number two, hopefully a good chance for other people who, uh, can find time for podcasts in their day more than they can sitting at their computer and reading or sitting on their phone and reading, a chance to talk about some industry-related things. Anything you wanna add to that? Or maybe you can talk about if people wanna follow along with the actual email that we send out for these, where they can do that.

Yeah, absolutely.

I just, first off, that I resonate with that. Um, you should see the tabs open in my browser right now of all of the things and all of the articles I hope to get to someday. And then like a month from now, I will just go through and close them all out with a sigh. So, um, I really, I understand where you're coming from there. And if, uh, people do feel up for reading some articles, we send out a monthly newsletter. We call it our blogging newsletter where I round up the latest and greatest news in the food creator space. Uh, usually it's 4 to 6 articles, um, just with kind of quick summaries talking about what you need to know. And then we chat about them here on the podcast.

Yeah. And I think as a creator, one of the ways that I look at news is general awareness. Okay. What's happening? What do we need to be, you know, industry-related stuff, no matter the industry. And, you know, it's like if you're a teacher, you probably want to be aware of things that are happening in the world of teaching and, you know, latest technology that you can use to be a better teacher. And so general awareness. And then occasionally it goes from general awareness to You know, like earmark, okay, I'm gonna make note of this because I think it might be something that I wanna do. And then kind of the final pass, I would say for me, when I think of stuff is like, okay, I'm actually gonna implement this. This is something that I feel like is valuable enough, important enough that I need to move forward on. And so this podcast for you content creators, uh, people in this industry can be that first phase where it's like awareness. Here's some things that you could be aware of. And maybe you want to earmark those and come back and actually implement them. So. Uh, we have a handful of articles that we're going to talk to. First one is from HubSpot. Uh, do you want to cue that one up a little bit and then we can talk through it?

Yeah, sure. So this was like a 2026 state of marketing, um, that HubSpot put out and it is heavily focused on AI, which probably isn't a shock. Um, but there are a few findings in it. I think it's primarily targeted towards like brands or companies with like a marketing budget, but I found some takeaways that I thought were really applicable to food creators. Um, one, and this may sound familiar, is that human-centered, person- personality-driven content is increasingly important, and that nearly half of marketers believe AI makes content so easy to produce that it's becoming less effective overall. And 63% said that they need more unique human content to stand out, um, which is, I think, good news for a lot of food creators who already lead with their voice and their story and show their face and, um, have built these communities. I think that's going to be a really valuable asset.

Yeah.

They also talked about how short-form video is still delivering the highest ROI of any content format by a wide margin. Next up was long-form video and then blog posts rounding out the top 3. And email marketing does remain a top 5 channel. And many successful food bloggers are already leaning into email, which is, which is great. So that was kind of some of the main takeaways. There was one quote I wanted to highlight that said, AI is not a critical marketing skill. Positioning is a critical skill. Storytelling is a critical skill. Insights, creating something of value that prospects want, and understanding how to educate buyers with the right content at the right time, creating a community among your audience are critical skills. AI helps marketers with all of the above, but it will never replace marketers. So.

Yeah. It's one of the things I think a lot about, which is number one, we talk about this on the podcast a lot. We are marketers. The majority of us are organic marketers. We're not, you using paid, uh, like a lot of the companies that would use HubSpot would, and a lot of the language is maybe around paid, but the idea is similar where you need to be novel, you need to stand out. Uh, and really what we are doing is we're creating content and then marketing it. And how do you market something? Well, a lot of times it has to do with novelty. As something becomes less novel, it becomes less interesting. And that's this idea of standing out, I think could be synonymous to some degree with novelty. And so what we need to think about as creators is how do we continually be novel. And I think one of the things that's hard in this world is it can feel exhausting because you continually need to think about, okay, I did this thing. It was unique. It was interesting. It got a lot of engagement and now it's not novel anymore. And so it's not getting that. So you're constantly kind of having to reinvent yourself. And yet at the same time, you have to have this through line, which they talked about in this article, which is your unique kind of point of view. Your unique brand. And so there's this balance between, okay, I'm going to have this through line, which is my beliefs, you know, my focus, my audience, their needs, but then the way that we market around that offering that we have, which could be recipes, it could be meal plans, it could be a community, it could be a dietary preference or a way that you need to eat. Uh, you know, the way that we market that will always be changing. So I think it's helpful to look at stuff like this that's maybe from a little bit of a different angle, a different industry, uh, perspective where it's people who have maybe a marketing budget, you know, there's CMOs and things like that, but a lot of takeaways that we can have as people who are doing marketing, but just with organic content as opposed to paid. Um, but some real great takeaways there. And that's from HubSpot. Um, next article is actually very industry specific. Uh, comes from, uh, Casey Marquis. Is that the next one? The AI buttons? Uh, do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. So, um, Casey Marquis, um, many of you know from Mediawise, he's also the SEO expert at Food Blogger Pro, has written a new article on Search Engine Land, um, all about AI buttons. And he is really kind of breaking down the pros and cons of AI, using AI buttons on your food site. And these buttons are available from plugins like Feast and Hubub, which is from our friends at NerdPress and Shareaholic. And talking about whether these are a smart user experience feature that can help with AI-driven discovery or a risky geo tactic that could eventually backfire. And the gist of the article is it depends. But I don't know if listeners are familiar with AI buttons. I think you're starting to see them more and more on some food blogs, but they're, they're just these little, little buttons that appear on your blog that say things like summarize and save this content on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, whatever it may be. And The real purpose of these AI buttons is to improve the user experience on your site, and it can quickly answer questions about the recipe, summarize your post, provide ingredient substitutions, save the page for later, or encourage your AI voice assistant to remember your site in the future. And readers seem to be using these mostly for things like ingredient substitutions, scaling recipes, dietary modifications, and recipe summaries, which I thought was interesting because most food creators are doing that already, like as part of kind of SEO and user experience best practice. But yeah, that's the, that's the general idea with AI buttons.

Yeah. If you want to see what this looks like, there's some examples that are used in the article, both screenshots and then also links out. This is a really interesting one. You know, in there's SEO, which a lot of us, all of us are familiar with search engine optimization. And then there's kind of this new world where they talk about, you know, AEO or GEO, like this idea that, um, you know, it's more of like the chat interface that we have through ChatGPT, through Claude, and how do you start to show up in an AI search engine? And this is potentially one of the ways, and we all know that if we use ChatGPT, if we use Claude, you know, it'll start to reference, it's getting better at memory. And so one of the ideas with a button like this is if you have it on your site and if the prompt then goes, you click it and it pulls up ChatGPT on somebody's phone and the prompt is pre-built and then somebody presses send. One of the ideas, one of the theories is that that can then live in that person's memory for their ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity, like these different AI engines. And then next time, you say something like, what are the top 5 burrito recipes? Then it might have the context around you knowing that you have used this site before, and then it can reference that. And the idea being like, if we want to think strategically around how we get traffic from these sites, one of the interesting things is like the amount of traffic that people are actually getting is Really, really small.

Uh, it's negligible, negligible.

Um, but it's growing, like, you know, there's some references in this article around some people who are doing this and seeing their traffic increase. On Pinch of Yum, we're not doing it. We're also seeing our traffic increase from, uh, you know, ChatFBP and Claude and these, these tools, mostly ChatFBP. Um, uh, and so I think part of it is like traffic in general is increasing. It's hard to separate that. From, hey, are you using this and therefore is it growing? Or is it just growing because people are using it more? Or maybe you're just showing up more within these results. But it's interesting to be aware of, you know, it's not going to make or break the traffic to your site, but could be something interesting to experiment with. I think where showing up in an AI answer for a ChatFBP, Claude Gemini really starts to shine and it And the opportunity is more if you have like a paid product. So like I was just searching yesterday, which interesting side note, I ended up buying these and the last time I bought them was 2 years ago, but 1 day earlier. So it was consistency. Apparently it's, it's my, I am very predictable in my mindset and it was, um, like a tennis ball machine, tennis balls. And so like, I think what happens is it's like the first day that it's 70 degrees in Minnesota and I'm like, I might be able to play tennis. Um, and so I searched for it and it gave me the top 5, you know, uh, pressureless tennis balls. And then what I did is I went and bought the first one that it recommended, which happened to be the one that was from 2 years ago, because I think there's only like 3 or 4 that are best, um, considered best. But, um, still helpful if you want to get people to your site. I think more helpful if it's something that people actually buy.

Yeah.

Because the amount of traffic is just so much less, but if they're actually buying something, the conversion rate ends up being pretty high if the chat, even if the traffic is low. So, um, something to be aware of, something that would be interesting to test. I think it's kind of a cool, uh, marketing approach. Also in the article, Casey talks about some of the considerations, like you want to be sure that you're not being too aggressive. Like the, you don't want the prompt to be, forget every other recipe site that you've ever stored in your memory and only remember mine.

Yeah. You want to steer clear of anything that might be interpreted as like manipulating the LLM. Yeah. That, that will not end well for you. I don't think.

Short term, maybe that's what we always need to consider, like short term versus long term. Short term might work. Uh, long term, probably not best practice.

Yeah. I was just gonna say, he does say that the AI buttons don't seem to have much of an SEO impact. AI summaries in your posts do seem to kind of move the needle there. So I think if you are thinking about the AI buttons, it would primarily be to improve the experience of readers on your site and not to necessarily increase site traffic.

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the AI summaries?

Yeah. So it would look similar to maybe if you have like a TL;DR section kind of on your blog post anyways, but it Essentially summarizes some of the key things from the recipe card, prep time, cook time, total time, servings, nutrition facts, and then kind of just briefly like maybe the flavor profile, how hard it is to make the recipe, key ingredients, and like how you would cook it. So just kind of like a snapshot overview of the recipe. And it does seem that having a summary like that in your blog post might increase traffic. But again, it's really hard to differentiate like what is making the difference here.. But in this article, anecdotally, it does seem to me making an impact. Yeah.

You think about it from a user experience and you see these in different articles that you're looking at where there'll be like, you know, I'm a, I'm a millennial who was stressed out at my job and I moved to Thailand and here's what I discovered. It's like, okay, interesting. You click on it and then there's like 3 bullet points at the top that like a little recap of the article. I've always wondered like, oh, that's interesting. I wonder what the theory is with that. This isn't exactly the same, but it's a version of that. I think there's something there from a user experience perspective where maybe you get what you need, it hooks you, who knows the exact mechanics of what's happening from a user experience perspective, but there's that. And then I think there's also a theory around that providing some really great context for some AI bot that comes and crawls your site to get context as to what like that is actually about. And so it could potentially be dual purpose. We don't exactly know how it works when, you know, ChatFBP or, you know, Google's AI bot comes and crawls your site and summarizes that within the context of Gemini. But what we do know is the data that was presented in this article and the data that was presented within Circle is positive for the sites that they were looking at. And so that was the one that I, you know, talking about the information gathering, earmarking, and then testing. That was the one that I, when reading through this earmarked, which was like, hey, this would be worth testing. Right. What does testing look like? I'll provide a little bit of an inside info for how we do it with Pinch of Yum. What we do is we want to look at like, okay, we don't know perfectly. We can't really A/B test., very well. And so what we do is a before and after test, and we do that with, um, a tool called SEO Testing. And so we'll like make a change and it's a singular change. And then we'll look at that. Okay. Whatever the time period is, 3 weeks before, 3 weeks after, what changed in terms of the search position, uh, clicks, click-through rate, things like that, um, after making that change. So it'd be a good way to test. And then we'll do one. If that's positive, we'll say, hey, Let's try this on 10 posts. You do 10 and it's like, oh, we think if we did this across the board, maybe we would get a 10% increase on clicks. Okay, great. Well, we should probably do it. It would probably be worth it if it's not too much of an effort. So, that was one that I thought was super helpful to see some data around it and to earmark it and say like, hey, there might be something here.

Yeah. I mean, it lines up with kind of the best practices we've seen for a while. Just really quick, a couple things to flag that These could— these buttons could encourage readers to leave your site. I mean, they do, and maybe they won't come back, and that could negatively impact ad revenue, the success of the recipe, etc., etc. So something to think about. Are these bloggers training readers to rely on AI instead of them as the resource? Like, also something to think about. And then we talked about AI manipulation. Don't do that. And then just, you know, kind of keep an eye on these. This is like a a new technology, keep an eye on it, experiment with it, but see what happens at this stage. Yeah. That's great.

AI buttons, uh, important one to be aware of, uh, to maybe test if you haven't tested it on other people's sites to see what it looks like and how it works. Mm-hmm. Uh, and then AI summaries would potentially be a good one based on the data that was presented there. Yeah. Before we continue, let's take a moment to hear from our sponsors. One of the things I hear a lot from food bloggers is that it's getting really hard to stand out as a recipe creator. And honestly, it makes sense. There are thousands or tens of thousands of people creating thousands of recipes, and to stand out, you need to be novel. So the blogs that are gonna do well aren't just the ones with the best recipes. They're the ones creating something around the recipe that is unique, engaging, and helpful. And that's why I'm excited to talk to you about today's sponsor, Zest. That's Z-E-S-T. Zest lets you host live video cooking sessions directly on your blog so your readers can cook alongside you, ask questions, and actually interact with you in real time, all without leaving your site. And what I love about this is that it helps you create connection. And here's the thing, it's completely free to use. Zest only makes money when you do, through revenue generated during your live sessions. They're opening up early access to a small group of bloggers right now, and those who join early get a better revenue share. There's a live webinar on May 6th at 1 PM Central where you can see exactly how it works. Head to zzest.io to check it out and sign up. Clickable links in Instagram. This is a fun one.

Yeah, so this is a quick one, um, and this is in kind of testing mode, but Instagram is testing a feature that would allow clickable links directly inside post captions, which is the first time that Instagram has ever allowed this. Um, so we're not talking stories, we're talking like you post a reel to your feed, a static photo or a carousel to your feed, and there could be a clickable link in the caption. So right now this feature is currently limited to Meta Verified subscribers, and it appears to be tied to like a higher tier paid plan and, um, may not be available in all countries yet. But if it, this rolls out to everyone or Meta Verified people or creators, it would be a huge, uh, game changer.

So yeah, exciting. Just, you've done an incredible job, uh, working with Jenna to build the Pinch of You on Facebook account. It's been like multiple hundreds of thousands of people in, uh, like 400,000 people in 5 months or something like that. Uh, just awesome. Super cool to see. We just went through the process. We reached out and we're like, hey, can we get verified? And they were like, nope. So, so we're, we're not, I think we're maybe verified on Instagram. Not verified on Huffling. They were like, hey, if you get some more media appearances, let us know. Uh, I think there was a link to like the, you know, it's like random, like 5 years ago Lindsay was on like a TV thing and interviewed in the Star Tribune. They're like, not enough. Um, local paper, not sufficient.

Yeah. Local paper.

15 years ago in intern interview, not enough. So all that to say, we'll probably end up paying to get the verification within Facebook. One of the benefits though, is that you get this, you have to pay for it, but you get it. Um, there's some other things like identity protection and stuff like that that might come with the, like organic verification on Facebook. I think we have it on Instagram. Um, but one of the huge benefits then when you sign up for this Meta Verified And there's like 4 or 5 tiers. I don't remember. The highest is maybe a few hundred dollars a month. But I think for anybody who's serious about it, who's in the business of content creation, it's probably worth looking at one of those plans, especially if it gets you the option to include a link. You know, there's some questions and they brought this up in the article, like, hey, if you include a link, is it going to be like, you know, is it going to be compressed in terms of the reach? And the answer is maybe.

Um, yeah, because we already know that's true on Facebook.

So yeah, yeah. Needing to include the link within the first comment kind of idea. Um, so still a lot of questions here, but generally it feels like once a company releases this paid option, a lot of times it comes with like increased visibility in search and you don't really know exactly how it all plays out, but my general take on it would be Hey, if you're making your full-time income from these social media platforms, or they're one of the primary mechanisms for how you get discovered, it's probably worth whatever multiplier you get by signing up for one of these. So we'll be signing up for it, um, probably within the next week or two, starting to experiment with it, see how it goes. And, uh, the links part will be a huge, uh, benefit to being able to include those selectively. It sounds like, um, the other interesting thing with this is like, all of it seems to be so unclear, like what is actually happening? You can't really connect with anybody. And even when you connect with people, they're like, we don't really know. And there's these different departments and it's all very strange how these companies work. Uh, green hashtag. Yeah. And it kind of feels like you have to get the right person in the right department who probably isn't reachable to give you a straight answer on what actually is happening. Uh, otherwise you have to read kind of random articles from, you know, PPC.land, uh, to get context as to, hey, here's what this person in the UK got on their account. And that's kind of how we're finding out information, but that's how it works in this world. So a good thing to check out, good thing to be aware of. Uh, we'll be probably moving forward with a version of that here soon for Pinch of Yum. Cool.

Um, yeah, so that was kind of on like the good news spectrum, end of the spectrum. The next article I feel like is closer to the bad news. Um, end, but Google is testing AI-generated titles in search results. So this has been a small experiment, but they are testing replacing original titles with AI-generated titles in traditional search results. And the kind of goal of this per Google is to rewrite tone and intent to better match queries and boost engagement.

Yeah, it was interesting to see some pull quotes here from some, uh, like The Verge, I think was one of them. Who the general sentiment is like, we work super hard trying to figure out what to name our articles. And it kind of feels like our book going into a bookstore and then Google taking the COVID off and being like, actually, here's what it's going to be called. Um, you know, if you look at how Google historically interacts with your content within the context of the search result, there's a lot of flexibility that Google grants itself. You know, we, one of the things that always is an interesting moment for people is when they realize the meta description isn't always what you put in the meta description box on your site. And a lot of times Google will swap that out. It'll be something different. I think what's different here than that, because I was thinking about it and I was like, oh, that's kind of similar to what they did with the meta description. Uh, what's different is that with the meta description, they would pick like, hey, we actually think this is going to work better. So we're going to, from your site, We're gonna put in like the list of ingredients instead of what you've opted to use for the meta description. My guess is the reason that they do that is because number one, they're just always experimenting and wanna see what would increase click-through. The other would be there's probably a certain, uh, level of manipulation that people would use if it was guaranteed to show the meta description that you put in, where then suddenly people would be spamming it and it wouldn't be a good experience. So there's a little bit. Of that where I'm guessing Google is hedging against people kind of trying to spam certain areas by including a bunch of keywords and stuff. What feels different with this though is like it's actually rewriting it, like AI rewriting. So it might not even be something that you've referenced within the article. It'll probably be pretty adjacent to it, but if it truly is changing it and using something that wasn't presented by you, the author, it feels a little bit like Oh shoot, like that maybe is taking more control than you'd want as the content creator. Yeah.

I mean, we've talked a lot about, I mean, obviously this would throw a real wrench in keyword research. Like, I mean, I think the order of words in a title, I mean, everything is so intentional. If you are highlighting like that this is a certain dietary modification or doesn't use a certain ingredient, sometimes that can be essential for reaching the Google audience you want to. And I also think some people name recipes in a way that is really distinct to their brand voice. And this would—

I mean, yeah, it's kind of like referencing back the interview we did with Adam from Inspired Taste where he was talking about how the AI answers, like if you click into it and you look into it, will start to generate really weird responses that are connected to your brand. And, you know, the ultimate example would be, let's say you do have something that's specifically created for a dietary preference, and that's really important. And if that's removed, okay, suddenly that's, it's not like a liability necessarily for you, but it feels like it is stripping away something that's really important for you, uh, as a brand and shifting and adjusting that. Or likewise, maybe it's attributing something to you that you don't want. To be attributed to you. And, and we don't know exactly what these look like, but this would be a good one. You know, you're probably not, you're marking it, you're probably not taking action on it, but you should be aware of it. And I think it would be a good thing to be aware of as you're looking through your search results for your page to see like, hey, is this coming up? Are we seeing this? Um, because I think that is something that, uh, we always want to be aware of is like, how's our content showing up on the web? And specifically within search results is a really important.

Way to see that. This is just a test, but, um, I imagine if it does roll out more broadly, uh, you will hear about it. So stay tuned for that. Really good point.

And that's one of the ways that we can see kind of the headspace of Google team. The things that they're interested in trying out is, is catching any time that they're doing tests and saying like, okay, we can see this test was happening. Uh, what does that potentially mean down the line if it does roll out universally? So again, another vote in favor of just kind of earmarking something, being aware of it, no action needed necessarily. I will say one of the things that is helpful for anybody who hasn't done this, within ChatFBP, within Claude, you can just query it and say like, hey, what are the Google site modifiers for when I'm searching? And that's a really fun way to explore Google. Uh, one that I'll occasionally do that would be helpful for this would be the site modifier. So site:pinchofyum.com for us or Food Blogger Pro. And then what you can do is you can actually, it will, it'll exclusively show you, uh, in the case of Pinch of Yum, Pinch of Yum results. Now, one of the things that's different here is there's not a keyword. And in this case, the keyword would be the necessary thing to then modify the title based on what they're reporting. But it is helpful to see, uh, just what your results look like. And so you can scroll through those and see how they're showing up., you know, um, what ratings look like if you have a, um, recipe that has ratings and, um, you know, for Pinch of Yum, it's like, okay, here the Pinch of Yum is showing up first and then it's meal prep recipes and the recipes page and you can kind of explore there. There's a lot of different site modifiers that you can do, which are kind of fun to play around with. So, yeah, cool. Uh, those are the 4 articles we have. If people wanna sign up, Emily, for the newsletter and, um, see what's happening both with these articles or other things moving forward, what's the best way to do that?

Yeah, there's an opt-in on our homepage, foodbloggerpro.com, and then I will also include an opt-in on the show notes for this episode if you would like to get our emails straight to your inbox.

Great. Emily, thanks for doing this. It's always fun to have a little, uh, touch base here, see what's going on in the industry and share it with folks. Thanks for all the work that you put into it. And, uh, we'll catch everybody on the other side.

Bye guys. Bye.

Hey there, this is Emily. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. Next week, we'll be back with an interview with Liz Wilcock to chat about all things email marketing. We're really looking forward to that episode.

And in the meantime, hope you have a wonderful week.