My 2025 Indie Web Report and Thoughts on the Open Web

My 2025 Indie Web Report and Thoughts on the Open Web How my independent website, Cybercultural, has fared during 2025 - a year when AI summaries whittled away search referral traffic and social media continued its war against hyperlinks. Browsing the indie web is like browsing a record store; you'll be surprised at the treasures you find. Photo by Josué Sánchez. I've always liked doing annual wrapup posts, from the Best Web 2.0 Companies posts on ReadWriteWeb in Web 2.0 through to the " What the Internet Was Like in {Year} " posts on Cybercultural today. So as we approach the end of 2025, I thought I'd turn my attention to the independent web - and in particular, my place on it. This website, Cybercultural, has continued to grow over 2025; but it's also been a perilous time for indie websites, due to the rise of AI and the decline of SEO. I'll start by noting some traffic trends from this year, since an indie website can only flourish if people actually visit it (or at the very least subscribe via RSS or email ). Traffic Trends Here were the top 10 posts on Cybercultural this year, not counting the homepage: The 3 Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen ; published May 28, 2025 GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet ; published March 7, 2025 What the Internet Was Like in 1998 ; published July 15, 2025 2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web ; published on November 11, 2025 What the Internet Was Like in 2004 ; published May 20, 2024 Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996 ; published May 7, 2025 1995: The Birth of JavaScript ; published December 22, 2020 What the Internet Was Like in 2010 ; published November 15, 2024 What the Internet Was Like in 2005 ; published June 1, 2024 What the Internet Was Like in 1995 ; published March 26, 2025 Five of the posts covered the dot-com period (including four from the current season 4 ) and five were posts in my annual wrapup series. The latter series has done relatively well in search engines and the posts are being cited by LLMs. Six of the top 10 posts were written this year, three in 2024, and one (the birth of JavaScript) was written way back in 2020. All my posts are designed to be "evergreen," although I'm not even sure what that means anymore in the age of AI and declining SEO. But that JavaScript post has endured - including as a source quoted by LLMs. Google's AI Mode citing Cybercultural. Overall, my website traffic in 2025 was much higher than the same period last year (the dotted line), although I hasten to add that it still pales in comparison to truly popular tech websites, like The Verge or my employer The New Stack. The spike in the chart below happened in late-May, when my most popular article of the...

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