Happy 17th Anniversary to Maldives Complete. This has been a bit of a topsy-turvy year for the site. About this time last year I was musing about whether to keep putting in the massive time and money to keep Maldives Complete going (“Should I Keep Maldives Complete Going?”). Then I got a major boost from Siyam who wanted me to come to their two properties, Olhuveli and Siyam World, which gave me the impetus and lots of great content for 2025.
But the news of the year, AI, has appeared to have boosted the site profile big time. After years of gradual increments in traffic, 2025 was record year for the site. Investigating the cause, the major driver appears to be the arrival of the big LLMs like ChatGPT and Copilot. AI devours data ravenously and there is nothing like a Maldives Complete buffet of data with its 2700 posts and unmatched databases. I’ve done a bit of research this year for the site on various Maldives topics and have been using ChatGPT and the like more and more. A bit surprisingly, the engines came back with answers footnoted to the Maldives Complete site as the source. A few other webmasters that I know who have high quality content have also reported getting a big boost in traffic over the same period with similar indicators. One of my challenges is people finding Maldives Complete after all of the commercial sites have paid an arm and a leg for Google ads and SEO to squeeze me out of the search result, but the LLMs appear to be more objective in their looking for relevant content to share (not to mention that the SEO hounds buy the position in line with a only little bit of content, but a lot of selling).