HubSpot Lost 80% of Its Traffic and Revenue Grew 19%

HubSpot's blog peaked at more than 20 million organic visits a month. Then AI Overviews rolled out, and the company lost nearly 5 million visits in a single 30-day period, eventually shedding about 80% of that organic traffic. Revenue grew nearly 20% in 2025. If you're still running a Monday morning report where the top line is sessions, that combination of facts should give you a moment of pause.

I ran an auction company for 20 years. We catalogued thousands of estates, and one of the first things you learn is that the number of people who walk through the preview is a terrible predictor of what anything sells for. The room could be standing room only, full of people there for the free coffee and the chance to touch someone else's grandmother's china. Or it could be eight serious collectors who buy everything. Volume is not value. That lesson applies directly to what HubSpot just demonstrated at scale.

What actually happened

HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar co-wrote a book called Loop: Outlearn. Outmarket. Outgrow., published September 22, 2026, with HubSpot's Kieran Flanagan. Search Engine Journal's Greg Jarboe sat down with Bodnar over Zoom and got him to answer questions that most authors on a book tour dodge.

The honest version of the story, which Bodnar told plainly, is this: HubSpot spent years publishing content designed to rank on Google, including posts about "famous quotes" and "how to type the shrug emoji." Those posts pulled enormous traffic from people who would never buy software. When AI Overviews started answering those questions directly, that audience disappeared. And almost nobody who mattered went with it.

"We had tracked traffic as the scoreboard for 15 years, and it said we were failing," Bodnar said. Then HubSpot looked at who was still showing up, specifically the visitors arriving from AI answers, and found they converted at roughly three times the rate of traditional search visitors. Deal cycles ran about half as long, because those buyers had already had the research conversation with an AI before they ever reached HubSpot's site.

Meanwhile, qualified leads from AI answers grew 1,850% between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026. Bodnar was careful to note that a growth rate that large almost certainly starts from a small base, and that attribution is imperfect. Many people who see HubSpot cited in an AI answer never click. What HubSpot could see was that as its AI visibility rose, more prospects were telling sales reps that ChatGPT had recommended it. "The signal is correlative, and it's strong enough that we treat AEO as a core part of how we market," he said.

Revenue grew because HubSpot had spent five years building audiences Google couldn't take away. It acquired The Hustle newsletter in 2021, launched a podcast network in 2021, started a creator program in 2022, and built a YouTube network in 2023. It also cut more than 3,000 blog pages that weren't reaching customers. By the time the traffic collapse hit, about 90% of HubSpot's content leads came from channels that barely existed in its mix five years earlier. The blog was down to 10%.

The wrong scoreboard problem

Here's the named idea I want you to take from this, because it's the one you can repeat tomorrow: the Wrong Scoreboard problem. You are measuring a number that used to track the thing you care about, but the two have come apart, and you haven't noticed yet because the old number still shows up in your dashboard every Monday.

HubSpot ran on the wrong scoreboard for years before the traffic drop forced the question. Bodnar now tracks three things instead: revenue per visit, AI share of voice, and content-influenced pipeline. Those are harder to pull out of Google Analytics with a single click. They're also the numbers that actually predicted whether revenue was going up.

The Wrong Scoreboard problem is not new. It's the same thing that happened when a lot of local businesses chased Facebook likes for three years and then discovered that likes didn't pay the rent. It's what happens when the metric and the outcome drift apart and nobody updates the dashboard. 88% of buying searches now return an AI answer, not your website. If your scoreboard is still organic clicks, you're measuring what AI is taking, not what you're building.

What this means for your business

You're probably not running 20 million monthly blog visits. So does this apply to you? Yes, and more urgently than it did for HubSpot, because you don't have a podcast network and a newsletter acquisition as a backup.

The owners I talk to in Phoenix and Scottsdale, running dental practices, home services companies, restaurants, and professional services firms, almost universally still measure website traffic as a proxy for marketing health. Their agencies send them monthly reports with sessions and rankings. Those reports are not lying to them, exactly. They're just measuring something that is slowly becoming less connected to the thing they actually want, which is new customers.

ChatGPT is already sending patients to dental practices, and the practices that show up in AI answers are not always the ones with the best search rankings. AI visibility and Google rankings are not the same number. If you're only watching one of them, you're watching half the picture.

The practical translation: a smaller number of visitors who arrive already convinced, the way HubSpot's AI-referred visitors did, is worth more than a large number of visitors who were there for the emoji tutorial. Your content strategy needs to answer real questions in plain language, the full question a buyer would actually describe to an AI, not just the two-word phrase they used to type into Google. Bodnar noted that traditional search queries run two to four words, while prompts in AI tools now run 40 to 100 words, with buyers describing their entire situation.

Under the hood

Bodnar's framework in Loop has four stages: Express (define your brand's point of view in what he calls a Taste Profile, before anyone writes a prompt), Tailor (personalize using real customer language), Amplify (put the brand where people and machines look for answers), and Evolve (feed results back so each cycle starts smarter). He calls the last stage Regeneration, and argues a team running 26 learning cycles a year will outperform one running four, even with better talent and a bigger budget.

The email result he cited is worth noting with the appropriate caveat: AI-written emails personalized to each recipient using long, detailed prompts that draw on the Taste Profile, real customer language, segment instructions, tone guidelines, and a banned-word list produced an 82% improvement in conversions for the AI-powered email, with AI driving an average 50% increase across HubSpot's broader email program. Those are HubSpot's own numbers, and Bodnar acknowledged the base rate wasn't shared, so you can't put that lift on a slide without asking what it was lifted from. But the direction is clear.

HubSpot also rebuilt its website chat to answer real questions and move conversations forward. By Q4 2025, Bodnar said it was generating more than 10,000 sales meetings a quarter. That's the other half of the traffic story: fewer visitors, better conversations, more meetings. The front door got smaller and the welcome mat got better.

What to do this week

Four moves, in order of how much it costs you to do them:

• Pull up your last marketing report and find the line that says sessions or visits. Ask your team or your agency what your revenue per visit is. If they don't have that number, that's the first problem to fix.
• Search for two or three questions your ideal customer would actually type into ChatGPT or Claude, things like "best orthodontist for teenagers in Scottsdale" or "how much does HVAC replacement cost in Phoenix." See if your business shows up. If it doesn't, that's your AI visibility gap, and it won't be fixed by writing more blog posts about emoji.
• Audit your content for the HubSpot trap: posts you wrote to capture search volume on topics your buyers don't actually care about. Those pages are costing you crawl budget and probably telling Google something blurry about who you are. Prune them or redirect them to something that earns its place.
• Start one audience channel you own and that Google can't take away. An email list. A YouTube series answering real customer questions. A monthly text to your past clients. HubSpot built five years of insurance before it needed it. You have less time than they did.

Skip it if

If your business gets zero traffic from your website right now and all your customers come from referrals, word of mouth, or a sales team, this specific story isn't your fire drill today. You don't have a scoreboard to fix because you never built one. That's its own problem for a different piece.

One last thing

Bodnar's cleanest line from the whole interview, and I'd put it on a wall: "If a company could put its logo on your message and nothing would change, that message is adding to the noise."

That's not an AI problem. That's a marketing problem that AI just made more expensive to ignore. The owners who figure out the difference between traffic and customers, before the traffic disappears, are the ones who get to grow through the transition instead of explaining to their partners why the numbers look fine but the phone stopped ringing.

So here's the question I'd actually ask a peer over coffee: if your website traffic dropped 80% tomorrow, would you know within a week? And would your revenue hold?

Sources

• HubSpot Lost 80% Of Its Traffic: CMO Kipp Bodnar Explains Why Revenue Kept Growing, Search Engine Journal, Greg Jarboe, October 29, 2026