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HubSpot Lost About 80% of Its Blog Traffic. Revenue Still Grew Nearly 20% in 2025, and Its CMO Calls the AI Signal He Is Betting On “Correlative”

Sandeep Amar · October 30, 2026 · 5 min read
HubSpot Lost About 80% of Its Blog Traffic. Revenue Still Grew Nearly 20% in 2025, and Its CMO Calls the AI Signal He Is Betting On “Correlative”
SEO · Answer Engine Daily

HubSpot’s blog peaked at more than 20 million organic visits a month and has lost about 80% of that traffic as AI answers spread, Search Engine Journal reported Oct. 28. Revenue still grew nearly 20% in 2025, according to chief marketing officer Kipp Bodnar, who walked a SEJ columnist through the numbers.

He called the link between HubSpot’s AI visibility and prospects saying ChatGPT recommended it “correlative.” And the one question he left unanswered was about Oct. 6, when HubSpot announced it would cut nearly 660 jobs, about 7% of its workforce.

The interview was pegged to Loop, Bodnar’s book with HubSpot’s Kieran Flanagan, published Sept. 22, 2026. HubSpot also sells AEO tools. Asked where Loop’s advice cuts against what HubSpot sells, Bodnar didn’t name a specific place.

Where did the traffic go?

When Google rolled out AI Overviews, the AI-written answers in its search results, HubSpot lost nearly 5 million visits in a 30-day period, Bodnar said. “We had tracked traffic as the scoreboard for 15 years, and it said we were failing,” he told SEJ.

“Much of that traffic was never going to turn into revenue,” he said. Some posts had chased search volume on topics like “famous quotes” and “how to type the shrug emoji.”

Revenue held up, by Bodnar’s account, because HubSpot spent five years building a newsletter, podcasts, a creator program and a YouTube network before it needed them: The Hustle newsletter, acquired in 2021, a podcast network the same year, a creator program in 2022 and a YouTube network in 2023. About 90% of HubSpot’s content leads now come from channels that barely existed in its mix five years ago, he said. The blog brings in about 10%. It also pruned more than 3,000 blog pages that weren’t reaching customers, the column says, though it gives a different figure later.

What does HubSpot measure instead?

“Website traffic used to track growth,” Bodnar said. “Now we look at revenue per visit, AI share of voice, and content-influenced pipeline.”

The AI side splits in two. A mention is when an AI answer names HubSpot; a citation is when the answer links to HubSpot. The team tracks both on its most important prompts, along with the sources engines pull from, often Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube or G2.

Qualified leads from AI answers grew 1,850% between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026, Bodnar said. He added that they convert at about three times the rate of traditional search, with deal cycles roughly half as long.

What is Bodnar careful not to claim?

“Attribution is imperfect,” he said. Many people who see HubSpot cited never click, so click tracking misses them. What HubSpot can see is that as its visibility rises, more prospects tell sales that ChatGPT recommended it. “The signal is correlative, and it’s strong enough that we treat AEO as a core part of how we market.”

Bodnar gave no starting number for the 1,850%. The columnist wrote that a jump that size “almost certainly starts from a small base.” The 82% conversion improvement Bodnar reported for AI-personalized email has the same gap. Asked about his line that he went from a “C” with generic AI to an “A” with a Taste Profile (a written record of a team’s taste, point of view and customers’ real language, built before anyone writes a prompt), Bodnar said, “Those grades are self-assigned.”

Bodnar answered every question but one. The columnist added a layoffs question after their Zoom call, said it was fair that Bodnar didn’t answer it, and pieced together a probable answer from news accounts, labeled as his own. In an Oct. 6 memo, CEO Yamini Rangan told employees the cuts were “not driven by AI-related efficiencies.” Product teams are being reorganized around four customer outcomes instead of Hub product lines, and Rangan said headcount has grown more slowly than revenue and will keep doing so. The Boston Globe reported that HubSpot had 8,882 full-time employees at the end of 2025 and expects $65 million to $75 million in restructuring costs. The columnist’s own reading, explicitly not Bodnar’s, is that the reorganization looks like Loop applied to the org chart.

What should SEOs take from this?

The columnist’s takeaway is that HubSpot made AEO a core investment on a signal its own CMO calls correlative. I agree, and I’d go further: that admission is worth more than the 1,850%.

I haven’t settled this, but here is how I’d measure it. I’d count mentions and citations in absolute terms on a fixed set of prompts, then check them against something real, like actual sessions or what prospects tell your sales team. HubSpot counting the prospects who tell sales that ChatGPT recommended it is that kind of check. First-party data won’t do it yet; Search Console shows AI impressions without clicks and ChatGPT shares nothing, as I wrote when Google announced those reports.

SEJ’s column suggests finding your own shrug-emoji pages: pull your top organic landing pages and mark which ones ever produced a lead. Just keep it in proportion. HubSpot built those other channels for years before the drop. Most teams haven’t.

Three things remain unanswered:

  • The 1,850% base: Only HubSpot can say how many AI-sourced leads it started from.
  • Who was cut: HubSpot has declined to say which teams lost the most jobs.
  • 3,000 or 30,000 pages: SEJ’s column says HubSpot pruned “more than 3,000 blog pages” in one section and cut “more than 30,000 pages” in another. HubSpot or SEJ would have to say which is right.

The columnist says the piece will be updated if Bodnar answers the layoffs question. The cuts themselves are due to finish by the end of Q1 of fiscal 2027, according to the Globe.

Sources

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