HubSpot Lost Up to 80 Percent of Its Blog Traffic and Published Its Own Explanation of Why

HubSpot's organic blog traffic fell from approximately 13.5 million monthly visits in November 2024 to below 7 million by December 2024, with further declines through Q2 2025 — a loss estimated at 70 to 80 percent of its organic reach. The company published a detailed explanation on its own blog, separating traffic loss from audience loss and attributing the decline primarily to AI Overviews reducing click-through rates on informational queries. Pew Research tracked 68,000 searches from 900 US adults and found that users clicked a result only 8 percent of the time when an AI summary appeared, compared to 15 percent without one. The traffic decline at HubSpot is not an isolated incident: Business Insider reported a 55 percent traffic decline between 2022 and 2025, and global publishers collectively saw Google referral traffic fall by approximately one third in 2025.

Key highlights

Ahrefs data showed HubSpot's monthly organic visit count fell from approximately 13.5 million in November 2024 to below 7 million within a single month. Various analyses of the Ahrefs data put the cumulative decline through Q2 2025 at between 70 and 80 percent of peak traffic. HubSpot acknowledged the loss publicly and framed it as a structural change in how informational queries are resolved, rather than a penalty or ranking drop affecting HubSpot specifically.

HubSpot's published explanation pointed to AI Overviews as the primary mechanism. When an AI Overview resolves the query on the results page, the search session ends without a click to any website. The 2026 data shows AI Overviews now chop the click-through rate for position-one organic content by an average of 58 percent when they are present. For HubSpot, whose content catalogue skews heavily toward informational how-to content and marketing definition articles — the exact query types most likely to trigger AI Overviews — the exposure was disproportionate.

HubSpot's explanation drew a distinction between losing traffic and losing its audience. Email subscriber counts and direct traffic held during the period when organic traffic collapsed. The argument is that content marketing value is broader than search-referred page views — but the scale of organic loss still represents a significant reduction in top-of-funnel reach for a brand that built its audience largely through informational SEO content.

The industry-wide nature of the decline matters for how B2B content teams interpret it. Business Insider lost 55 percent of traffic between 2022 and 2025. Global publishers collectively saw Google referral traffic fall approximately one third in 2025. The common factor across affected publishers is a high proportion of informational query content — exactly the category where AI Overviews are most dense. Transactional, navigational, and comparison-stage content has seen less severe declines.