Let’s take a step back for a moment on travel and have a real talk about the impact of AI on Food Wada Travel because it’s not nothing.

AI has been a problem in 2026 on our readership

All publishers know that AI usage in search results specifically have lead to a decline in clicks. You create content, put the content out there for all to see, AI reads it, and refers back to the content as a summary. It’s a version of Cliffs Notes where you don’t need to reference the original material and instead you (hopefully) get the gist of it.

The problem with this approach is that the people who create the content don’t get much in return. No ad revenue, no affiliate network opportunities, not even awareness for the brand. All the results just get diluted together into an answer for the person who initiated the search though it might lose relevance because important nuance or considerations are lost in the process.

And the impact on blogs is real. Just take a look at viewership for this blog, starting with the month that I went to writing an article 6 days a week (December 2024). Progress isn’t linear, but readership was growing up until August 2025. Ever since, there has been a very pronounced downward trend and now it’s even lower than when I started posting daily.

But you might ask if this is truly the result of AI. After all, Wikipedia points to the starting point of global inclusion of AI-generated results in searches as being October 2024. Just because something is available doesn’t mean that people have discovered how to use it immediately. There’s always a slow ramp-up to adoption and deeper integration of the technology to make sure you notice it. I don’t have definitive proof other than knowing the relative ranking of search results has modestly improved yet viewership is going down.

How this blog uses artificial intelligence

From the start, let’s say that I haven’t had much desire for artificial intelligence. Up to this point, it feels AI is more just a restatement of a popular opinion (a form of confirmation bias) than anything truly “intelligent”. It feels almost like watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and seeing the audience answer the question incorrectly, especially after you spend some time convincing the audience that you think you’re right before you ask them.

Thus, AI usage on this blog is incredibly low. Yes, I used AI to generate the picture above for this post to be deliberately ironic. I honestly dislike the image. The cartoonish lighting just doesn’t appeal to me and even just having it on this post makes it feel unauthentic to me. But it drives home the message that it doesn’t have a place for me on this site. Don’t expect to see more of it.

But aside from that, there’s only one image I asked AI to adjust for the blog and it’s this one from our post on the Le Centre Sheraton Montreal. I just wanted a person sitting at a pool chair to be removed from the image. And I spent way too much time validating that nothing else about the image was changed in the process.

Where AI has clearly dropped the ball…

That was the only time AI actually assisted me in doing what I wanted to for my photos. I’ve tried tinkering with AI, but it just didn’t look good. I mean, take this original image from when we went to Brussels and tried out curling. The photo sure is blue isn’t it?

Well, I’m not yet good at Photoshop, so I thought surely AI would help eliminate the blue. Uhh, it looked quite strange. Suddenly Jenn had almost reddish hair and there is a weird yellow tint to everything. Mind you, Jenn is actually wearing a hat in the original picture, and I guess AI wanted to remove the hat along with changing the color of the picture.

Even worse is when you zoom in on our daughter Char… my poor girl.

And to be clear, in the original, she is facing away from the camera, not to mention the background is all different. Sigh.

I’ve since gotten a little bit better at modifying my photos to remove some of the saturated color because I simply cannot rely on the technology. There were times when it also came up with a title for a couple of posts of my articles, but it felt worse than what I came up with myself.

Some might say garbage in, garbage out: since I wasn’t specific enough in my request, I got garbage back. But while that might be true, I don’t feel it’s worth my time to nitpick the proper query to get the desired result. And then to deeply analyze these photos to make sure they’re not AI slop. I’d rather just take the time to learn a new skill and do it myself. It feels far more rewarding to do it that way.

Will there be much change for Food Wada Travel?

With that all said, is there much change for how we handle the blog? First of all, this blog all started with Jenn documenting Secret Trip back in 2015. If I ended this blog shortly after I finish up review of Secret Trip 2.0, that would be incredibly depressing for me. Thus, we’re not going to talk about ending anything.

Food Wada Travel is a side business for us. We both have full-time jobs that pay the bills and we do not rely on any income we get from this. This is a personal passion of mine to have an outlet for me to offer up my experiences both for my own memories and also to inform others of what we liked and what we didn’t like. And that gives me the freedom to do what I want. I don’t need to blog about only high-revenue topics and instead talk about things that interest me.

Some sites are shifting their models away to require subscriptions to read or moving to a different format (videos). Given this is a side hobby, don’t expect much change from us. I have ads on the site to help pay for hosting and as long as I can pay for the fees of doing business, I’m happy enough. Hosting isn’t free, especially with the 15,000+ images that are on this site. Don’t expect us to introduce a new writer who isn’t part of the family just so we can get a quick buck off guest posting.

Whether the AI bubble bursts or not, we’ll keep chugging along provided we still can pay the bills on this thing (fingers crossed). Thanks for reading along!