How AI KILLED 80% of His Affiliate Income 😱 ft. Anil Agarwal Every Affiliate Marketer Must Watch

Is traditional SEO really dying? 🤔 If you’re a blogger, affiliate marketer or SEO professional, you’ve probably felt it: falling traffic, vanishing affiliate commissions and Google’s AI answers swallowing your clicks. 😬

In this episode of Inside A Hustler’s Brain, I had a brutally honest conversation with Anil Agarwal, founder of BloggersPassion and one of the most respected voices in Indian blogging for over 15 years. 🔥 (The episode is in Hindi, so this post is your English summary.)

Anil has weathered every algorithm storm. He doesn’t fearmonger. He shares exactly what he’s seeing and testing right now. 💪

📊 In this episode, we unpacked:

• 📉 Why SEO traffic keeps falling in 2026
• 🛒 Why Google now favours brand sites over affiliate blogs
• 🔀 Moving beyond blogs: paid ads, agencies and AI products
• 🧪 Parasite SEO on LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora and Medium
• 🎯 What new bloggers should do instead
• 🤖 LLM SEO and llms.txt: what’s proven and what isn’t
• ✍️ How Anil uses AI for content without letting it write
• 💰 Email lists and where Anil invests

🎥 Watch the full episode:

📉 Why SEO Traffic Keeps Falling

The term has changed, Anil says: it’s not just SEO anymore, it’s AI SEO. Since AI arrived in search, traffic to sites has dropped a lot. 📉

People are reducing their dependence on Google and building their own traffic through Reddit, Medium, Quora, YouTube, direct visits, email lists and push notifications. And Anil expects it to get worse. 😟

Back in 2023, the Helpful Content Update hit many of us. My own sites lost 70–80% of their traffic. Anil says sites recovered some traffic after that, but in the last six months to a year, AI Mode by default and AI answers inside the search results have cut the share of traffic even further. 🔻

For more on this shift, read Andrei Builov on what works in SEO now. 🔍

🛒 Why Google Favours Brand Sites Over Affiliate Blogs

Anil believes Google is showing more product and brand sites and fewer aggregators and affiliate blogs. The logic: if an affiliate blog ultimately sends people to the brand anyway, Google can send them there directly. 🏷️

By his estimate, blogs used to take about six of 10 results. Now it’s maybe one or two out of 10. 📊

His conclusion: “We may have to step out of the blog ecosystem.” 🚪

🔀 Moving Beyond Blogs: Ads, Agencies and AI Products

Anil is now exploring options that feel safer for the next few years:

• 📣 Paid ads, which he’s exploring now
• 🏢 An agency model
• 🤖 His own AI product, like a WhatsApp or LinkedIn marketing tool

He’s even unsure about WordPress’s future. AI tools can now build and host a site in minutes without a separate CMS or hosting, and plugin-based sites are easier to hack. Leave a site untouched for six months, and a plugin issue or malware can break it. We’ve both seen hacking attempts on our sites. 🔐

For a WordPress-insider view, read Ronnie Burt on AI automation at WordPress.com. 💻

🧪 Parasite SEO on LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora and Medium

Anil used LinkedIn articles for a while, and at one point it was profitable: Google was showing two or three LinkedIn results out of 10, often near the top. But over the last six months, he feels Google has downgraded LinkedIn. 📉

Now Reddit is everywhere. His team created its own account and is building it slowly, without spam. No success story yet; it’s still a trial. He’s also A/B tested some other sites that rank easily for certain keywords. 🧪

Quora and Medium are working too, but you have to build trust with the audience slowly over time. For a deeper dive, read Charles Floate on parasite SEO. 🧠

🎯 What New Bloggers Should Do Now

Starting a content-only SEO site? Anil thinks there isn’t much scope, at least for now. Instead, he suggests:

• 🎥 Videos and Shorts
• 🧩 Micro products that solve one problem, like a link-building or PR marketplace
• 🔌 Small WordPress plugins, like ones built only for internal linking
• 🤖 AI tools that automate small SEO tasks, like writing SEO titles or optimizing image sizes

Every site needs interlinking, and many people can’t do it manually. Solve a small problem for a big audience, and it can be profitable in the long run. 💡

🤖 LLM SEO and llms.txt: What’s Proven?

How do affiliate sites rank in Gemini, Perplexity and ChatGPT? Anil is refreshingly honest: he doesn’t know exactly yet. 🤷

His team created an llms.txt file and uploaded it, but they can’t tell what impact it had. For now, they study the content structure of sites appearing in Google’s AI Mode and learn from them, but there’s no proof or science that doing X produces Y. 🔬

Some sales do come from ChatGPT, and I see the same with some proxy offers I promote. But the numbers are still small. For more on this, see Liam Quirk on the new rules of ChatGPT SEO. 📈

✍️ How Anil Uses AI for Content (Without Letting It Write)

Anil isn’t using AI to write his content. He uses it for ideas, help and research:

• 🔍 Give AI the top three ranking sites for a keyword and ask why they rank
• 🏗️ Improve the structure of existing content
• 🩺 Audit a site after an update hit: share the history and ask what to do next
• 🕳️ Find content gaps and new ideas

My experience is a bit different. On my affiliate sites, AI content is ranking for coupon code, free trial and pricing keywords, as long as it’s helpful and has a human touch. For review articles, a human editor proofreads everything. It’s working for me, but I don’t say it will for everyone. ✅

After the March update, most of Anil’s sites saw some movement, with some up around 10%. But the old traffic levels? I once reached around 4.5 million in traffic, and now that kind of SEO traffic feels like a dream. That’s why you need to diversify your sources. 🌐

💰 Email Lists, AI Tools and Where Anil Invests

Anil is now monetizing his email list: emails carry information, some commercial content, and sponsored brand deals in newsletters. 📧

For AI tools, he mostly uses ChatGPT. His team is deep into Claude, and he’s researching how to use it in his processes through integrations and APIs. 🤖

Where does he invest? Mostly real estate and traditional bank FDs. He doesn’t invest in gold, and only recently started a small stock portfolio as he learns. 🏠

For his earlier story, read how Anil Agarwal made $250K with a single affiliate product. 🎙️

📝 Key Takeaways From the Anil Agarwal Interview

• 📉 SEO traffic is falling and Anil expects more decline
• 🛒 Google is favouring brand sites over affiliate blogs
• 🔀 Diversify: email, Reddit, Quora, Medium, YouTube, paid ads
• 🧪 LinkedIn parasite SEO worked once but has faded
• 🎯 New bloggers should try videos and micro products
• 🤖 LLM SEO tactics like llms.txt are still unproven
• ✍️ Use AI for research and audits, with humans in the loop

❓ FAQs About Anil Agarwal

Who is Anil Agarwal?

Anil Agarwal is the founder of BloggersPassion and one of India’s best-known bloggers and affiliate marketers, with more than 15 years of experience.

Is SEO dead according to Anil Agarwal?

He thinks SEO traffic will keep falling and that Google is favouring brand sites over affiliate blogs, so he’s diversifying into email, paid ads, agencies and AI products.

Does llms.txt help you rank in AI search?

Anil’s team created and uploaded an llms.txt file, but couldn’t measure any clear impact. He says there’s no proof yet of what works for LLM SEO.

Does Anil Agarwal use AI to write content?

No. He uses AI for ideas, research, content structure and site audits, not to write his articles.

🎙️ More Inside A Hustler’s Brain Interviews You’ll Love

• He’s Earning LAKHS Monthly with AI SEO 💰 ft. Pavan Agrawal
• He LOST His SEO Empire.. Then Built It Back With AI 💪 ft. Kripesh Adwani
• How Did Kulwant Nagi Rebuild His Life with AI? The Untold Story
• 15 Best Affiliate Marketing Podcasts to Follow in 2026

If Anil’s honest take gave you even one idea, share it with a blogger friend who’s worried about AI search. 💬

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