Did HubSpot Lose 80% of Blog Traffic? Here’s What Actually Happened

hey everyone last week the internet was on fire about us at HubSpot losing 80% of our blog traffic well Kieran and I built that strategy and continue to own that strategy and so instead of getting all the gossip we are actually going to tell you the real real we're going to break down the truth did we actually lose 80% of our blog traffic what happened how did we even think about it but more importantly what strategies are we using to scale growth today and in the future and we're going to give you the behind the

sces look we're going to give you three things you can go and do today to go and grow your search traffic and your overall marketing demand let's get to Today's [Music] Show we're having a unique show today we went viral on Twitter and Linkedin this past week for HubSpot because there was some data showed from a couple companies that we lost 80% of our blog traffic as a marketer that is like the last thing you want to go viral for is like losing all of your traffic right that is not the thing you want to

actually have people uh obsess over I mean like every post on my LinkedIn feed was like a a hot take cuz then I looked at it and I was like the numbers are not accurate and so num these are estimate is like panel data that's an estimate and I would say Kieran this is also just for our English language blog General Trend accurate but the actual numbers not accurate and then like so then and then it was just like okay hot take after hot take where where are we going here more hot take hot take

oh my God hopspot blah blah blah blah I can fix it 10 minutes man UPS spot they shouldn't even rank for these keywords to look they haven't even looked at their conversions they should stop chasing vanity traffic I mean people have you read anything that we've ever posted ever but it's like do you think we're Chumps cuz we're not but it was but it was cool there was a big conversation about one of the things I will say is like look we're content creators and so we in the field doing it as well and I

so I get it I get it like if it was me I get why you're making the takes I you need you need to have a you need to have a take I will say some of them are were just bad but there was a lot of there was a lot of hot takes that were wrong but we still pretty good actually and and then I was 2 days later and I logged on to LinkedIn and it was still going there was still like more takes and I was like wow this is incredible the best

tweet I saw last yesterday was Turner Novak was like with all the Deep seek AI stuff he was like LinkedIn is really going to freak out about deep sync when they learn about it next week right we were the talk of the time um there were articles there were takes it was all oh yeah like search engine land article that that was up there we didn't share that there's all kinds of stuff happening and it's really like in the olden days what would have happened right is that people would have speculated about all of this

you and I wouldn't have said anything we would have never said anything exactly and it would have just been like this a bunch of just Shadow whispering in the background and instead one of the reasons we have a YouTube channel is for days like today when we can say hey this is actually how we think about this challenge this is what we do and this is what we think everybody else should do right right exactly and so that's the that's the setup for the show we're going to actually break everything down take you behind the

scenes and give you some perspective on what to do going forward when it comes to search content demand gen all of those fun and important topics today don't worry for all of the people who like the drama we are just te you up on the story but we're getting to the SEO goodness all right so don't worry we are getting to the the juicy details that you want right I I will say if you listen to the show I think what we're going to go through is going to be no surprise when we actually talk

about Trends on the show when we actually talk about how marketing is changing you should take that as like these are things that we are actually doing because if we believe in them these are the Investments we're making so hopefully for listeners who have listened to the show a lot and uh have understood like the things that we've been talking about when we go through this story you'll recognize like a lot of the trends we've talked about we have been instrumented for some time now yeah I look I think one of the big things for

everybody watching understand is that if you want to know if somebody's good at marketing talk to them about Arbitrage can they find inefficiencies and ways to you know Buy Low sell High essentially and I think at HubSpot over the last 15 years we figured out a lot of of ways to buy low and sell high with search traffic and it was a core part of our growth but Kieran you and I we started having conversations 2019 2020 about this exact topic right right like not that not necessarily the AI impact because I don't think anybody

knew that then so I'm not going to pretend that we had that Crystal Ball but we talked about oh media format's changing the video video is becoming a much bigger part of the internet people are getting content in very different ways we think there's only a certain kind of available Market through search engines what do we need to do differently and like do you remember those conversations and kind of what we were talking about yeah influence basically we believe that uh for the most part brands have focused a lot on how do we acquire informational

content like how do we create informational content and acquire people trying to learn things but we actually believe that you would have to start to really double down on influence and these other channels where you acquire people who are trying to like think through things right like people who are trying to be want an influential point of view on things and actually when we stepped back and you and I looked at channels um that were growing and back then yeah we can we're going to get into like the AI component of this the AI disruption

of Google was not yet in place right we we could never have predicted that no one would have predicted that but we had seen that most of the channels that were starting to really grow were these kind of influential channels like YouTube or podcast past or social where you actually had to have a different kind of strategic Direction on content like you had to do things much much differently and that's why I think the start of this story is probably why we acquired the hustle because this is like the very the very reason that we

decided to acquire that company that team it was never for how do we generate demand from those assets it was always how do we start to how do we create strength in these influential channels how do we learn to be like excel in these influential channels in the same way we did for blogs and I think that's the thing where I saw when you kind of see a chart and you have a hot take you don't actually know all of the things that have that are happening in the background as part of that like one

that make up that one chart right it's not we don't think of search and isolation we think about how to build a large marketing and distribution engine as a whole one of the things we can share with folks Kieran is this is a slide I wrote in May of 2021 right which is kind of just what you're talking about here right which is I did a presentation to the hubs SWOT marketing team and I was like I always have a list of principles about how we're making decisions and this is how we thought about Marketing

in May of 2021 so we had just bought the hustle right and we had said hey we are going to drastically change how we think about doing a marketing and I said that hey a a SAS business has to have a large scale media operation across all content types and channels to drive cost effective influence and demand that was like one we bought the hustle to kind of validate that point right ass SAS business has to have deep education that includes certification credentials a commun community and network that's HubSpot Academy that's all the all of

the work we did there and it turned out to be really right because now you look at Reddit and all those Community sites they are a huge influence on the world today right right and then own media is a better channel for brand advertising than rented media the thesis was there like hey if we build a YouTube network if we build a podcast Network it's all vertically integrated and we can have our own ads that are host read and host integrated full not just like the ad copy but the what the actual offer is everything

we will get much better engagement and conversion rates than if we were going to go and rent space on somebody else's media that has also become true right if you look at our ability to monetize our own media assets it's far better than if we're trying to monetize somebody else's media assets the big thing that I missed there was around creators Karen right Creator creators AI doing that today creators would be a big part of that because creators are now more effective and more efficient than programmatic advertising and that would be like the comma next

part of fly three knowing what we did today number four was like we had to reduce friction and automation at every part of the marketing process that's just like how can you make your conversion rates better like make sure that your site is clean that the conversion flows make sense all of those things that's just like good U ux and cro understanding your unfair advantage in marketing is how you lock exponential growth that was basically like what are we really good at and we were really good at creating educational and entertaining content for our market

and we leaned into that and that's how we were able to grow and then the last one was the message and how it is delivered both have to be remarkable and that's like it used to be like you could just write a article and post it on an ugly website and now it's like wow you have to create a great YouTube video have a perfect thumbnail perfect description all of those things the packaging the distribution is just as important as the thing that you make and and so those are the things that I think probably

root everything we're about to talk about for the next few minutes like we're based on those decisions basically exactly I think uh we we had a line in there about like hey we had Excel that you know the kind of informational content era but we don't believe that that's what's going to continue to maintain our growth over the next like 3 to 5 years so again this was a 3 to 5 year play and we kind of believed there was a shift that we were seeing where over time informational content gets commoditized and then you

actually will start to see much more need to excel in these influential channels where you have to be an every day you know you have to be an everpresent part of someone's life and so we kind of used the analogy that informational content you turn up as a world- class brand with someone searching for things but in influ influential channels you are an everyday Present part of their life cuz you're the media that that they actually consume and that part we were making the pitch that we didn't we didn't excel in that part right we

actually hadn't built the muscles in that part and we could either build a team over time to do that or we could acquire talent and build the talent from there and actually accelerate accelerate our our growth there and like the best example of that is when we bought the hustle they officially moved over I think in Feb I can't remember was it Feb 2021 cuz it was like I didn't get to meet right before I did that I justed right and so Within by July we had launched the we had acquired the hustle we had

embedded them on the team we had launched we had taken my first million and launched a podcast Network along with that which I think was about 15 podcasts we had by the way nobody if you go back and look at everybody who talked about that hustle acquisition they're like cups SW bought a newsletter for Le that's what that's what it is for lead generation for leads and what and and what did we do we bought a newsletter and a amazing podcast and they also had a a community called Trend so we bought three core assets

and that my first million podcast is now one of the most successful YouTube shows and business podcasts in the world right and we and we leveraged that asset to build a podcast Network and then we launched the Creator program we had all that done within six months and that Creator program now is actually a pretty great part of our distribution engine and is actually very different from what any other brand would have cuz they it's a hard thing to set up and so it's a much more of a defensible asset than like a Blog today

and so that I think that's the start of the story is like the preparation for that chart started four years ago and I think what was interesting is that first of all shout out to S par who started the hustle and is now good friends of ours and hired a really great team there that really helped us transform how we made that approach like our creator program Steph Smith built the V1 and she's incredible right like so many really amazing people across the hustle team and so many of them are now off running major media

projects now it's quite a quite a network of humans right but yeah so if you look at that chart of the HubSpot blog traffic going down the plan to prevent that from being an issue for our business started in 2020 right right like it started five years ahead of anybody sharing that chart and what we're trying to do is tell you what we did over the last 5 years and tell you hey if if you're a business going forward how you think about that and I do want to give you credit Kieran I think one

of the best slides I've ever seen was that slide you were just talking about a second ago which was hey when people search they see you kind of in specific Parts about their day but we want to hit them across their day in the emails they read in the ads they hear on podcast and the videos they watch when they're doing search research all of those things and that's what we've been able to do and I think it's what's interesting right it's very easy to get web traffic in these tools it's much harder to look

at the over overall influence we were doing no real brand marketing at the time and we have now built a high-scale brand marketing uh machine if you pull up if you pull up just even publicly available data on our branded search traffic it looks like this right it's like just a complete up and to the right the like in a pretty unbelievable way look I want to share a secret with you there are companies out there there are Brands out there they're building hundreds of millions of dollars of Revenue off of this marketing Playbook that

I want to share with you today we've got a special guide it's available in the link below but it's going to go through everything you need to know it's going to give you the new marketing Playbook how do you actually work with creators for more personality Le strategies how do you protect against AI disruption especially when it comes to how you're getting traffic from search engines we're going to give you the new ways to think about building and executing your marketing it's all for free it's all on the guide you can find it in the

link in the description below yeah I want I want to show you what we mean here and what we've been building towards okay so this is a a CEO I think this is like a really good example of what we mean by influence and so he talks about the fact that there was this like look look how long it took him to purchase hot but let me give you the journey he was an Avid Reader of the hustle and the my first mum podcast no idea uh what hopspot did hopspot bought the hustle they turned

off all the ads and amped up investment content so by the way we you know turned off the ads right count intuitive to what you would expect we would do and said hey we're going to be this Media company for entrepreneurs and Founders and then between 2021 and 2023 he was exposed to HubSpot every podcast he listened to every newsletter he read HubSpot wasn't changing the content but they were dripping tiny drops of HubSpot is legitimate and growing the business and using them in my ear so again kind of integrated HubSpot smartly throughout the content

and then their sales team put together a proposal for a CRM in 2024 HubSpot oh yeah HubSpot they're super legit I consume a bunch of content that they own this is like part of what we mean by influence right and so it's a harder thing to both build and a harder thing to quantify but we always believe that actually this is where we are moving towards and the Investments we made there are starting to pay off now like you had some really great stats on YouTube like demand from our YouTube Network that we've created demand

from uset is actually rivaling the blog so you look at that number that's but that's the thing people have to understand where most marketers fail is they find one play that works so a Blog paid ads whatever right and they get real growth and they just keep trying to iterate more and more growth from it and then it eventually flatlines and collapses right what your job is is to add multiple Little Engines it's the it's the Apple chart one of the best charts of all time is where Apple had MacBook Revenue then they added the

iPhone Revenue then they added iPad revenue and they started stacking up different lines of Revenue growth the same thing happens in marketing you have to have a diversified approach and that what that allows you to do is have growth in areas and losses in some areas but net out to really successful growth and the growth that you need to keep driving and growing the business right the content engine was like a core part of our distribution engine it really was like the staple of our distribution engine and how we kind of built that system to

create content and then convert you onto these longer form offers we added fremium and fremium became a bigger part of our distribution engine we create much more demand through fremium than we do through content the content side today then we stacked on YouTube Network a Creator program the newsletter Network these things generate actually more demand today than than our blogs and so we have Diversified that engine a lot and I think one of the things is hard to do and I do get this when you look at that chart and you haven't had to operate

at the same sort of scale and I don't mean that in a condescending way but maybe for some folks you kind of do I I really don't like I just think that when you haven't when you haven't had to like like you like we talk about this you and I all the time the law of large number problem like there's no point doing there's no point doing a lot of this other stuff because it just is incremental to us and we actually can't afford to be incremental because of the numbers we need to actually hit

over time and it's hard it's kind of hard to wrap your head around that when you look at these things in in isolation but I think that's like that's like chapter one of this I think this is a good like set to scene in that yeah we were pretty um pretty deliber in the decisions we made the lesson that we're trying to tell here is have a clear perspective about the future then shift time and money over over a long period of time into new areas of investment in your marketing we had some thesis that

we did right and it turns out that those worked very well they also took a lot of time right right they didn't happen overnight influences took a lot to figure it out right it is a much harder thing to to scale and to do and to actually have your executive team be okay with those Investments because they don't yield the same T type of visible return on investment in the same time frame as something like Performance Marketing at the but at the same time I will put up the rate of brand awareness growth we've had

over the Last 5 Years against any B2B company in the world yeah and it's because we own our own be shocked if there were more than a couple of companies that grew their brand awareness faster because we did really good brand marketing and we did all these influence plays and like the compounding effect of them really drove a step function change in brand awareness all right let's give it let let's give the people you know they all in podcast they would say the red meat let's give them the juicy details that they want on what

actually happened for the search side I know you want to show something think this is an artic reveals 5 insights about h but traffic wo oh my God I tell you this we in such big trouble man this isn't about this xhops part cuz she's awesome and her her post is awesome there's multiple people in there that are all great we've worked with them they're all there was a lot of people in LinkedIn was like I once worked at HubSpot and read a blog post let me tell you exactly what is going on in here

one day you know I was in HubSpot customer support team someone mentioned the blog let me tell you everything I know it's like oh was wild look look I I I'll never have any hate for creators trying to jump on a trend no and do their thing right I I get it but we want to we want to break down the real real what I wanted to know is there there did you want to go through the actual issues that they call out in this post or not that's kind of go through where we where

we are and so there's a couple of things we need to make sure people understand the one that I the I don't mind any of the hot takes because we are in the hot take game oursel um I understand it the one I think is really misguided is to think that we a team who have built the size of engine we have Chase vanity metrics like traffic we have literally never looked at the return on any channel based upon a vanity metric like traffic other than maybe as a leaded indicator for what we actually are

are measuring against so we have always looked at conversions into customers we have actually most of our channels ring Fen against LTV deac numbers and so you may find find that some of the traffic that people some of the keywords that people pulled out that we lost uh rankings for you would look at and you would say hm why they're chasing vanity metrics I can tell you like we have built an engine that is ring fence to revenue generation and so they may look odd but they convert at small rates but when you when you

add them all up and you trying to operate at our scale they do equate to a pretty uh great return on investment we've also pruned we continually pruned the site so I think we've we've probably done around 30 to 40,000 Pages now the blog is probably like a quarter of a million Pages do we miss posts now and again yes because we're trying to do other things right like like any any brand can we give the HubSpot blog team SEO team everyone on the team a huge shout out because lost in all the story is

that over the last five years they've been able to grow traffic Roi for HubSpot in a massive way that has been a big fuel to our business and our growth and I would like to thank them right and they buil they do not deserve all the people being jerks out we you and I can handle it we don't care right like this is this is part of our job it's not part of their job like I I would always talk about the engine they built it's like one of the most dialed in incredible things and

they they were like I think one of the my takeaways here is we probably give away too much like we actually taught the course and how to do that and people replicated it and that's what I'm coing to is like one of the problems that happened is that people started replicating exactly what we did and so I suspect we're going to actually tell people directionally where we're going on things but we're not going to be as specific and we're not going to specifically teach courses and everything we do because it just doesn't it doesn't favor

us so we built this like incred we built this incredible machine and the Machine basically tells us each quarter how much net new traffic we can get within our editorial calendar the editorial calendar is mapped to keywords that convert and we look at the whole thing on LTB the CAC and then we try to prune the things that don't convert do we always get it 100% right no we probably miss certain posts what actually happened is over time there was people a lot of people got this right like we own a lot of the traffic

in our core verticals and we have to try to keep growing across all of these channels and so we tested going further up the funnel did those things convert further up the funnel did those things convert and that and if they converted into customers then we would create the content on it because there are some relevance to the people we're trying to acquire or else they wouldn't convert and anything that didn't convert after a certain period of time we would actually try to prune those things and and what happened is because of AI we believe

is that people have replicated that at scale and so now you have a lot of sites created a lot of content that maybe are you know kind of questionable in terms of the core relevance to their customers and when you get people doing this on scale Google will react and so Google are now trying to get people to much more be much more dialed in and focused on like their core areas of expertise or what they believe their core areas of expertise to be and those things that they believe that that company does not have

relevance for anymore they kind of have diverted that traffic to places that they think are much more on topic for those those so those topics and so what we did actually some time ago is we built a fit and intent model across our entire marketing engine not just across search and that basically is a we're able to categorize everything into different fit cohorts and different intent cohorts and so we started to look at fit last year uh before this all this this all happened we started to actually break out the traffic into different categories of

fit because we ourselves were going to start to heavily prune the low fit categories and so we already had that done and so we were already in motion that Google you know got ahead of us a little bit in in in some of its recent updates but the Takeaway on this part is you always have to react to What Google are telling you based upon the way its algorithm is changing what it wants from you and what we see what we see that it wants from you is because of the proliferation of AI and a

ai's ability to create volume and even though we think some of that content is like far worse than the amount of time and effort we put into creating our content Google is telling us hey like there's certain topical areas that you should be an expert on but you shouldn't be the expert for these ones and we want you to focus on the things that are much more in your kind of highfit category and not so much in your lower fed category even if you summarize all those low fed articles and look at the conversion in

customers it's still kind of like worth your time doing but we don't want you doing that anymore and so that's like number one right I'll start with that and I'll let you react but that's like number one thing that is one of the things that is that has happened and one of the core lessons and takeaways I would have for people who want to start to replicate some of this for their business and their sites if you're out there trying to build an SEO strategy do you have unique data unique insights unique customer base perspective

feedback on a topic if so you can probably own it get really good search traffic if you don't and in theory what I would call generic AI you know a base level llm could go out and create a similar type of article that a human could then you're probably not going to get search traffic on that right that's the most basic way and so as you're thinking about how you want to grow your search strategy you have to understand now that the total addressable Market that any company has out there in terms of search traffic

they could go after after has shrunk that is the point you Kieran I think you're trying to make is that you have to be smart you have to have differentiated data point of view things that make you uniquely qualified to share that information share that story share that education and if you don't it's going to be very hard to be successful doesn't mean that you might not be successful for a little while but it's going to be very hard to be successful and that success is probably not going to be long-term sustained success yeah it

will not equate to long-term sustained success so I I would say that um we were not caught up we were basically directly we were directly we were going in this direction anyway it's just that like Google had created some updates move faster because the model the llms move faster so that's like AI I think I think that's like AI disruption that we had not talked about before that I have started to really think about which is AI actually creates mass volume of things and so what it really means is the critical part of marketing is

the actual core value that you can create which means the quality right so yes I do think that we were rewarded for a long time by the algorithms for like quality and quantity together but actually there's a lot more emphasis on the kind of really dialing in the quality part really dialing in your ICP your ideal customer profile really dial dialing into like you're a good fit because AI is going to just create such mass volume I hold on K I want I want to what I want everybody to understand is that like if you're

a marketer you should obsess about like how markets work and free markets and Market Dynam Dynamics go and learn a bunch of that and I want to just restate what you said for everybody we got rewarded for a long time because coverage of key was very hard like you would remember you would Search keywords and like there would just be no good answer right and we invested so much time and money that we got rewarded for helping increase that coverage when AI came along there's no longer the coverage problem right like that problem is solved

the inefficiency is not in the breadth the in the inefficiency is in the depth right right which is the argument you're making and so if you're going to win you're going to win on depth and quality and community and real human insights versus breath of coverage because AI really solves that breath of coverage in a way that didn't wasn't true 5 years ago like so I think that covers a lot of what has happened on the search side the second one that we can talk a little bit about that people have brought up we have

brought up is how much we are seeing disruption from no click and these kind of you know AI results within the search ptients themselves and I guess the best way we we see that more acutely than I think most brands in bdb because we built such a large distribution engine so I think a lot of bdb companies would say when we talk about this we're not really seeing that yet like you've talked to some folks who are starting to see it but because we were so large we could see things happening much sooner than others

because we're in all of these different uh you know keyword spaces and what I would say we've seen is in places where you have like early adopter folks you are really starting to see some cannibalization there where you see an increase in no click searches you see AI you you see less people click through to your page because they're able to get the information they need within the AI search itself and I think that is we've talked about this I don't know if we need to spend too long this because we've talked about this since

the very first time chat chpt was relaunched in that November we very first episode after that you can go all the way back we literally talked about the fact that this is the death of Blue Links or search as we know it I think it will take some time we are seeing it an early adopted markets that is a small part of this that we do see a decrease in traffic because uh people just get their information they need via these kind of AI assistance search traffic because of AI overviews and and perplexity chat GPT

Claud is going to continue to go down just as you said Karen what we're seeing is that our traffic from llms is increasing it is increasing and you know and you know why it's increasing because of this diverse influence Playbook because now we're not just influencing humans we're influencing robots right right and we are marketing to both and like we were on a slack thread the other day with somebody at at HubSpot and they were doing some research on deep seek the new AI model on chat GPT you know what was included in that result

kieran's YouTube video on deeps deep from our YouTube channel it wasn't not anybody's crappy blog post on deep seek your really good 10-minute video on what the heck was going on and we've been working on building for years right and it drives Real views that was a thing that surprised me like it tripled the number of views that video cuz it showed up in chat GPD search yeah that video is now one of our most successful videos because people immediately were like hey I want I care a lot about this this is a good start

chat GPD but I want to go and hear from somebody who has expertise on this directly Boom kieran's video right so I think that's number two which is like these AI assistants and being part of those getting surfaced and search from that experience in appearing for a YouTube channel it's going to drive real volumes especially for something like deep seek that was trending and so your first is like double down on fit second is you have to figure out how to start to appear in these kind of AI search results to show up in those

AI search engines you have to have think about your content not just from traffic and clicks but from influence and you think have to think about how you're influencing humans and robots right and that's how you're going to grow your audience from from people using llms for search instead of traditional Google right the third one we'll leave with and then we can wrap up which is uh someone had this as part of their which I thought was one of the better ties I can't remember call or who it was or i' called them out which

is volume for transactional searches is fine we uh we've actually grown substantially in any keywords that are transactional transactional we talked about before which is someone searching for a product someone searching for an action not informational content and so that chart showed just informational content which is blog but if you actually looked at transactional keywords but we grew pretty healthily last year and so there is definitely complexity and how you look at look at these things but I think that I think the summarization is like the fit part the uh AI assistance becoming a more

prevalent part of search part and transactional is still pretty fine part like that's the three takeaways from what I would give people who really want to know what is happening in Search and is and you know what how do we feel about it what are we doing my core final takeaway here here Kieran is in any channel whether it be search or anything else you have to obsess about what value humans can provide versus AI robots can provide right and the same thing is like if I'm trying to influence a human am I able to

am I trying to influence a robot am I able to and I think historically we've just been thinking about even Google as humans not as a true like really smart intelligent search engine and that has changed and so you have to have this High influence High AI differentiated Playbook to succeed over the next three to five years and there you go that's the reality right that's the real talk put questions in YouTube and we'll answer them we don't we don't have anything to hide as long as we can uh we're okay legally to answer them

we will answer them hit subscribe and uh we'll be back with you back with some fun AI content and all the stuff we really like to do on the next episode see you all soon this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of HubSpot HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is full integrated W I can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed hpot grow better