HubSpot lost 80 percent of its blog traffic and revenue still grew

Search Engine Journal reports that HubSpot's blog traffic peaked at more than 20 million organic visits a month. It is now about 4 million. In the same year, HubSpot's revenue grew about 19 percent.

The piece is a written question-and-answer with Kipp Bodnar, HubSpot's chief marketing officer. Greg Jarboe wrote it. The questions are built around Bodnar's new book Loop. All the figures below come from HubSpot, as reported in the piece.

What Bodnar says changed

Bodnar told Search Engine Journal that one Google AI Overviews rollout cost HubSpot almost 5 million visits in 30 days. The 80 percent fall is measured against the earlier peak of 20 million.

Visitors from AI answers convert at about three times the rate of old search traffic, Bodnar said. HubSpot's qualified leads from AI answers grew 1,850 percent year on year. That was the first quarter of 2025 against the first quarter of 2026. The company says it ran more than 10,000 sales meetings a quarter by the end of 2025.

Bodnar says much of the lost traffic was readers who were never going to buy. He gives two examples. One is people searching for famous quotes. The other is people searching for how to type a shrug emoji. Those visits sat high on the traffic charts for years. They did not sit high on the revenue chart.

What a 1,850 percent figure means and does not mean

The 1,850 percent number is year on year, from HubSpot's own tracking. HubSpot has not said what the starting number was. A small base can produce a large multiple with few new leads. The company does say what the leads are worth now: over 10,000 sales meetings a quarter at the end of 2025.

The 3x conversion figure is HubSpot's measurement of its own traffic. The piece does not say how HubSpot tags a visit as coming from an AI answer. It also does not say how the baseline was measured. Teams who want to copy the test should ask HubSpot what counts as an AI-sourced visit.

Where the leads come from now

About 90 percent of HubSpot's content leads now come from channels that were small or absent five years ago. Bodnar lists newsletters, podcasts, YouTube and work with outside creators. The blog, which was the main channel, now brings in about 10 percent.

The company also measures how often its brand is named in AI answers. Bodnar says the mentions are up. The sales team now treats a brand mention in an AI chat as the start of a buying journey. The piece does not break the mention counts out by tool.

A team that reads this and wants to check it has one easy test. Pull last quarter's traffic report and last quarter's revenue report. Read them side by side. If both charts move in the same direction, trust the traffic number. If they move in opposite directions, as HubSpot's did, the traffic number is measuring the wrong readers.

Source

Search Engine Journal, Greg Jarboe