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Here, Kieran Flanagan, senior vice president of marketing at HubSpot, breaks down the recent buzz around HubSpot’s blog traffic decline – what’s real, what’s overblown, and what it signals for the future of search.
Data from a couple of panel companies had estimated that HubSpot lost “80 percent of its blog traffic” and the internet freaked out. Every time I logged onto social media, I was hit with a deluge of posts on the story, each sounding more confident or outlandish than the last. Not only was everyone an expert on the topic, but they were claiming to be the ones who had it all figured out.
Look, I get it. Everyone’s got an opinion, and as a content creator, I understand why. And while this trend of social media virality is worth exploring another time, I want to give you an insider’s view on what actually happened with HubSpot’s blog traffic decline and what you can learn from it.
Don’t rely on one marketing play
If you only take one thing away from this article it should be this: the numbers aren’t accurate, but the trend is. While we didn’t lose 80 percent of our blog traffic, we are seeing a decrease. In fact, the preparation for the disruption to search started five years ago. That was when Kipp (CMO, HubSpot) and I started to have conversations about making a concerted effort to move away from viewing search in isolation and building a large marketing distribution engine as a whole.
Around 2019 we began to realise that relying only on search engines to reach customers was limiting. Media formats were changing and video was becoming a bigger part of the internet. People were going to “influential channels” like YouTube, podcasts and social media to hear opinions and explore ideas, not just to look for information. In fact, part of the reason we acquired the media company, The Hustle, was not to directly generate sales (as was the “hot take” at the time), but to build muscle in these influential channels in the same way we did for blogs.
Today, our podcast network, creator program and YouTube channels generate demand equivalent to our blogs, and are growing faster. Yes, our blog continues to attract organic traffic, particularly for transactional keywords. But that is why diversification is a key part of our strategy. Most marketers find one winning play – blogs, paid ads, whatever – and ride it until it crashes. You need to have a clear perspective about the future, strategically dedicate time and money to new marketing areas and continually test and iterate, before you plateau. Leadership needs to understand that ROI won’t happen overnight, but it will lead to compounding change.
Prioritise quality in a shrinking search market
Some of the ‘hot takes’ suggest we’re chasing vanity metrics. They couldn’t be more wrong. We’re not interested in traffic for traffic’s sake. Our entire content engine is ring-fenced against revenue generation, with each channel rigorously measured against LTV and CAC. Over the years, we’ve pruned over 30,000 blog pages where the content wasn’t converting. Those “lost” keywords that have been called out, while perhaps low-performing individually, contribute meaningfully to our bottom line at scale.
Here is what’s actually happening. HubSpot has created an incredible content machine that crunches the numbers, figures out what keywords convert and helps us prune the stuff that doesn’t. Over the years, we’ve been rewarded for addressing the lack of keyword coverage. But suddenly, AI allows brands to create informational content at scale so breadth isn’t enough anymore. The rules of the game have changed; Google no longer rewards volume and wants more relevance and depth. We saw this in the traffic that we lost.
For HubSpot, this is a direction we were already heading in, but we needed to move faster. We integrated a custom “fit and intent” model to figure out what content really resonates with our audiences. The bottom line? You need to be ready to react to Google’s algorithm changes. The total addressable market of search traffic has shrunk and it’s not enough to create content to rank anymore. To win, you need unique data, quality, depth and community – the stuff AI can’t fake.
Focus on influencing both humans and robots
There are a few critical shifts happening in search right now. First, no-click searches and AI-powered search results are cannibalising search traffic, particularly in early-adopter markets such as the United States. For B2B brands, this means fewer people are clicking through to your page as they’re able to get the information they need from AI-powered search engines.
Second, optimising for AI search is a thing. While HubSpot’s traditional search traffic is declining, our traffic from large language models is increasing. We’ve seen huge jumps in views from our YouTube videos that surfaced in ChatGPT search. For marketers, this requires a radical shift in thinking, focusing on influence rather than just clicks and traffic. We’re not only creating content that resonates with real human users, but for algorithms that curate AI search results.
Finally, while informational search traffic is down, transactional search traffic is strong. We’ve grown substantially in any keywords that are transactional. For example, people actively looking to buy or take action. This brings me back to this; be wary of sweeping statements on the death of search, particularly those based on incomplete data. Dig deeper. The truth is in the details.
Kieran Flanagan is senior vice president of marketing at HubSpot and the former chief marketing officer at Zapier. He’s also an active angel investor, Sequoia Scout and advisor to some of the fastest-growing tech companies in the industry. Flanagan is a co-host of popular marketing podcast, ‘Marketing Against the Grain’.
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