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Checked 100 old competitors in 2026: 85 are gone. Is niche publishing dead or reborn with AI?

So back in 2018 I started a small affiliate site. Did it for about 5 years—never made crazy money, just some decent side income—and eventually just abandoned it.

Fast forward to now, I decided to get back into the exact same niche with a new domain, mostly because vibe coding with Claude made it stupidly easy to build actual web tools and calculators. Back then I couldn't code and couldn't afford devs, but now I can ship a working tool in like 20 minutes.

I pulled up KeySearch to check on ~100 sites that were my main competitors back then.

Honestly it’s a total ghost town:

  • Around 80-85 of those domains don't even exist anymore. Fully deactivated.
  • The few that are still live lost almost 95%+ of their traffic. Sites that used to pull 600k-700k monthly visits now get the same traffic as a 2-months-old blog.

I know the old 2018 playbook (cheap product reviews for SEO) is long dead. But seeing the actual data still shocked me.

Which brings me to my question for anyone still doing this:

Is the niche site model completely cooked regardless of how you monetize? Or did Google basically clear out all the spammy affiliate junk, making room for solo builders who actually ship useful tools and interactive stuff using AI?

For those of you still active in SEO and niche sites: I've been out of the game for a long time, and now I'm just trying to get my hands dirty and build things again.

I'd really love to hear your experiences and honest thoughts on this. What’s your current strategy, and where do you see this heading?

submitted by /u/maglortelemnar
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