Nobody Is Reading Your Blog Post. They Weren't Going To Read Mine Either.

I was building a slide deck last week... technical content, thoughtful structure, a solid wall of text I was genuinely proud of. Somewhere around slide four I had a moment of uncomfortable clarity. Nobody is reading this. Not because it's bad. Because nobody reads anything anymore. And AI-generated content isn't causing that. It's just proving it. The Research Was Telling Us This for Decades Back in 1997, Jakob Nielsen and the Nielsen Norman Group published eye-tracking research showing that users read roughly 20–28% of words on a typical webpage. They scan in an F-pattern: a horizontal sweep across the top, a shorter sweep a bit further down, then a vertical skim down the left edge. That's it. The research has been replicated and updated many times since. The pattern holds. Then in 2014, Tony Haile at Chartbeat — analyzing data across billions of page views — reported that 55% of visitors spent fewer than 15 seconds on a page. Scroll depth data from the same era consistently showed mo