On September 23, 2026, People Inc launched the MyRecipes app. The press release listed its content sources: "Allrecipes, Better Homes & Gardens, EatingWell, Food & Wine, Real Simple, Serious Eats, and Southern Living." Seven brands, one app. Allrecipes appears first because it's alphabetical. In the product architecture, it's already something else — a content library inside a platform that carries a different name.
This is a brand autopsy. Not because Allrecipes is dead. Fifty-two million people visit every month. But because the thing that made it a brand, rather than a database, is being quietly retired.
Bought from Bankruptcy
Allrecipes was founded in 1998 as a user-submitted recipe platform — one of the earliest community-generated content sites on the web. Reader's Digest Association bought it for $66 million in 2006, when it had roughly 12 million monthly visitors. Then Reader's Digest went bankrupt in 2009.
Meredith Corporation bought Allrecipes out of the wreckage for $175 million in 2012. The audience had more than doubled to 25 million monthly uniques. The price had nearly tripled. Reader's Digest had grown the asset and gone bankrupt anyway. When IAC acquired Meredith for $2.7 billion in December 2021, Allrecipes came bundled inside — no longer a standalone acquisition, just one of forty brands.
The Bridge That Was
In 2015, Meredith acquired Groceryserver, a startup that had built shoppable recipe technology — the ability to turn an ingredient list into a shopping cart. By 2018, Allrecipes had a working AmazonFresh integration: click a button, and the ingredients for tonight's dinner arrived at your door.
This was the bridge. Recipe to cart to delivery. Content as commerce infrastructure.
In 2024 and 2025, Amazon signed deals with NYT Cooking ($20–25 million per year), Condé Nast, and Hearst for its Alexa for Shopping recipe integration. People Inc — the company that owned the largest recipe site in the world and had already built the technology — was not among them. The Groceryserver integration had calcified. Nobody rebuilt it as a platform.
Sixty-Four Percent
SimilarWeb data from June 2026 shows Allrecipes at 71.5 million visits over three months, declining 5.46% month over month. Organic search accounts for roughly 64% of traffic.
AI Overviews now trigger on the majority of recipe queries, and Food & Drink saw the fastest growth in AI Overview triggers of any vertical in 2025 — up 7.25%. When an AI Overview appears, 83% of searches end in zero clicks. For recipe searches, AI Overviews can reproduce an ingredient list and a set of instructions directly on the results page. The recipe becomes the AI Overview. The click that used to lead to Allrecipes leads nowhere.
There is a counterargument. An Inspired Taste survey of 2,000+ respondents (September 2026) found that users prefer human-created recipes by a 300% margin, and only 12% deliberately use AI for cooking. But that trust protects the format — human-written recipes — not the brand. When an AI Overview reproduces the recipe without attribution, the trust has nowhere to land.
Content Source
The MyRecipes platform now has 5 million registered users. The app launched September 23 with Kroger as sponsor and 100,000+ recipes from seven People Inc food brands.
In this architecture, Allrecipes is a content source. Its recipes feed the platform. The brand appears on the recipe cards the way Getty Images appears on a stock photo: provenance, not identity.
This is probably the right move. A single app with five million registered users generating deterministic identity data — email, dietary preferences, engagement patterns — is more valuable than a traffic-dependent website with 52 million anonymous monthly visitors. MyRecipes is the future. Allrecipes is the library.
But it is worth noting what was lost. Allrecipes was community-generated content before anyone used that phrase. Users submitted recipes, rated them, adapted them, argued about them in the comments. Twenty-two million people visited on Thanksgiving Day 2019 not because Google sent them, but because that's where the turkey recipe was — the one with 4,000 reviews and a running debate about whether to brine.
That community doesn't die. It disperses. The recipes remain. The arguments move on.
Sources: MyRecipes press release · SimilarWeb (June 2026) · Press Gazette · Inspired Taste survey via Washington Times · Contently · SEOProfy