The Fall of HubSpot's SEO: What Marketers Can Learn in 2025

In just a few months, HubSpot’s organic traffic plummeted by over 50%.

The numbers were stark–a drop from approximately 13.5 million organic visits in November 2024 to less than 7 million in December 2024, according to charts from Ahrefs. 

The post since deleted, but originally by Ryan Law, Director of Content at Ahrefs, caused a ripple effect across the marketing world, sparking debates and analysis from SEOs, content marketers, and growth experts.

And it set LinkedIn on fire about about HubSpot’s declining organic traffic. 

SearchEngineLand created a good roundup of responses from around the web.

HubSpot’s SEO struggles aren’t just about AI-generated content flooding search results.

There’s a deeper issue at play. It’s the result of systemic shifts in how Google prioritizes content. They are prioritizing forums and UGC content over content from "traditional" websites.

George Chasiotis from the content agency Minuttia went over this in our latest webinar. 

Here’s an example of SERPs George provided for “best habit tracker app” in September 2022. 

9 out of the top 10 examples are from direct websites.

‍Here’s the same search from January of this year: 

Now, only 3 traditional B2B websites are included in this SERP. 

Instead, it’s Reddit, Quora, and even a LinkedIn post taking spots. 

That’s a critical takeaway for anyone relying on search as a core growth channel.

Did anything go wrong with Hubspot?

HubSpot’s SEO approach was once heralded as the gold standard: they were the kings of inbound marketing especially through search, encouraging brands to be a resource hub. 

I still remember this how-to guide from probably 10 years ago, featuring River Pools and how they answered every single question about fiberglass pools and maintenance. 

It’s a strategy that worked brilliantly—until it didn’t.

As Hubspot grew even larger, expanding from a marketing automation platform to a CMS to a CRM, their list of topics grew too, stretching their topical authority and what they were “known” for. 

HubSpot’s strategy of casting a wide net may have worked in a less saturated search environment, but today’s algorithms are different.

Here’s what SEO consultant Gaetano DiNardi said about Hubspot's traffic decline on LinkedIn:

I liked these points in particular: 

• Google doesn't really want you publishing topics that are "too far astray" just for the sake of getting traffic.

• Why publish these topics anyway? Extreme top of funnel is not worth it.

David Ly Khim, a former member of HubSpot’s growth team, offered another perspective: The SEO from Hubspot evolved into a brand play instead of a direct conversion one. 

“At that scale, SEO becomes a massive brand play. If Google search is a billboard (it is), HubSpot was plastered on every billboard,” David said. 

What worked five years ago doesn’t necessarily work today, and HubSpot’s inability to pivot quickly enough is part of what led to their current traffic decline.

For instance, once your site becomes that large, it’s difficult to turn the ship all at once. 

“When HubSpot began optimizing for EEAT, it required overhauling processes in a way that significantly slowed the output of net-new content AND optimizations. Additionally, pruning a blog at HubSpot’s scale, with thousands of articles, is no small task and takes extensive effort to execute effectively (and SMARTLY). And let’s not forget — the iconic shrug emoji moment (that so many are referencing) happened well before HubSpot even had a formal SEO strategy,” said Bianca Anderson, a former member of Hubspot’s SEO team said on LinkedIn.

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About that shrug emoji 🤷‍♂️

Oh yes, the shrug emoji. 

Hubspot had a post about how to make a shrug emoji. 

It gained infamy for being one of Hubspot’s most popular posts, going back 5 or 6 years ago. 

Tim Soulo from Ahrefs made it internet famous in this presentation he gave. This clip is cued up at the right spot: 

As of mid-January 2025, the shrug emoji post was getting even more traffic, at least according to Ahrefs. 200k+ visitors per month. 

But after all this came to light from Ryan’s post, the shrug emoji post seems to have disappeared as well. 

It now redirects to a post about the importance of content audits.

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However, there is no doubt that their SEO worked to a certain extent. 

Yes, that’s a 2200% return on the stock since the IPO. 

If the shrug emoji strategy isn’t broke, don’t break it…until it’s time to break it? That time seems to be now.  

The Solution: Rethinking SEO in the Age of Saturation

In all seriousness, what’s the takeaway from all this discourse? Is there anything you can do to future-proof your SEO?

The game is evolving, and businesses (including Hubspot) need to evolve with it. 

The rules of the game have changed:

• Depth and topical authority matter more than ever.
• Non-generic, data-driven content has become more important

Let’s return to something Bianca mentioned in her initial LI post: “When HubSpot began optimizing for EEAT, it required overhauling processes in a way that significantly slowed the output of net-new content AND optimizations.”

Optimizing content at scale is definitely a challenge. 

You don’t just need tools at that point, not with a site like Hubspot.

You need a system. 

The old, traditional SEO playbook won't work like it used to.

Now, SEO strategists will need to become more like digital marketers by thinking holistically about how their brands can be perceived as valuable and authoritative.

Evolved SEO roles might involve driving discussions around their products, ensuring their websites appear on review sites, or generating quality backlinks to establish brand authority.

The metrics you use to measure your success will change, too. While clicks and traffic are still important, it's becoming increasingly vital to measure impressions, as well.

Customer-centric strategies matter more than only keyword clusters.

The future of SEO will be drastically different from today.Rather than focusing solely on keyword clusters, SEOs need to craft compelling narratives around the problems their products solve. Cultivating a strong online presence across platforms beyond Google, and positioning their brand as a go-to solution for customer needs will be higher priorities for SEOs, as well.

This year, HubSpot's SEO team rewrote its game plan to focus on optimizing content for user intent and search patterns, rather than fixating on keyword clusters.

To appear in AI-powered search results, you'll want to take a note from HubSpot and other brands by tailoring your offerings to address pain points of customers across channels (including social, podcast, YouTube, and search).

Increase high-quality content production and reviews with AirOps

Fortunately, AirOps was built to help businesses tackle complex, evolving challenges like these. Here’s how:

1. Optimize workflows with automation

AirOps optimizes workflows by automating processes like topic approval, content briefs, and progress tracking. It also creates automated systems for assigning tasks and maintaining transparency across teams.

• How it helps: Writers, editors, and SEO teams stay aligned with clear communication on priorities, due dates, and performance expectations.
• Outcome: Fewer bottlenecks, reduced back-and-forth, and a smoother end-to-end content creation process.

2. Analyze depth, structure and keyword coverage

Using AirOps, teams can analyze content depth, structure, and keyword coverage to identify improvement opportunities that align with search algorithms.

• How it helps: AI-powered insights help fine-tune existing articles or guide new content creation to enhance topical authority and user relevance.
• Outcome: Stronger rankings on SERPs, higher engagement, and a systematized approach to optimizing evergreen content.

By including your knowledge base of articles within your AirOps brand kit, you can also maintain a consistent tone of voice and perspective throughout articles (or a segment of articles), helping sites make massive overhauls and changes. 

How Wyndly 20x’d organic traffic growth with AirOps

One AirOps client, Wyndly is a telemedicine platform specifically for allergy treatments. 

With AirOps, they’ve been able to increase their content production while also outperforming other top medical sites on key terms. 

Their results have been extraordinary. See the full case study. 

• 28% increase from organic channels
• 20x growth in organic traffic
• 5x increase in monthly content production

Here’s the Wyndly traffic chart from SEMRush: 

Wyndly’s challenge was with finding operational efficiencies of managing content creation, which limited their ability to scale:

• Content strategy and decision-making driven by individual writers
• Complex and resource-intensive workflow management across multiple writers
• Need to maintain medical accuracy with provider review

Wyndly uses AirOps to help them refocus their content strategy and scale their content production.

“When you’re scaling an SEO team, operationalizing becomes crucial. Most of our decision-making happened at the individual level during the brief and keyword research level, but we needed a way to scale the actual content creation without compromising quality or medical accuracy,” said Aakash Shah, CEO and co-founder of Wyndly.

Final Thoughts: SEO Isn’t Dead—It’s Changing

HubSpot’s SEO struggles are a cautionary tale for marketers everywhere. The old playbooks no longer work, and the businesses that thrive in this new landscape will be the ones willing to adapt.

In fact, you can look at tools like Figma and Canva for how they’re growing. 

Here’s a chart from SEMRush on Figma’s growth: 

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Eoin Clancy, head of growth at AirOps, outlined this in another recent LinkedIn post: 

• Use community as a growth engine. This increases your DA, keyword positions, and the number of ranked keywords
• Focus on robust, on-brand content marketing. Figma increased its content production velocity utilizes user research or statistics, while gaining 120M backlinks in the process. 
• Create a network effect from the ecosystem. By (potentially) partnering with platforms like Freepik, Flaticon, and Storyset, Figma benefits from backlink hubs covering images, icons, and illustrations—exactly what existing users will search for.
• Smart SEO and intent. With 1.9M total ranking keywords, Figma invests in on-page optimization for high-intent queries. They continuously refresh and update existing content to reflect the latest design trends, boosting search positions versus competitor pages that are stale. 

So, is organic growth dead? Not exactly. But it’s evolving. And with the right tools and mindset, your team can evolve with it.

The future belongs to marketers who prioritize precision and systems over scale and shortcuts. Are you ready?