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Happy Monday.
Somewhere in this morning's deck there's a traffic chart, and it's probably pointing down.
HubSpot's pointed down harder than yours. Its blog peaked at more than 20 million organic visits a month, then lost about 80% of that as AI answers spread. Revenue kept climbing anyway, up nearly 20% in 2025, CMO Kipp Bodnar told Search Engine Journal.
"We had tracked traffic as the scoreboard for 15 years, and it said we were failing," he said. When Google rolled out AI Overviews, HubSpot lost nearly 5 million visits in 30 days.
Then the team looked at who was still arriving. Visitors from AI answers converted at roughly three times the rate of traditional search.
The honest bit is the one most of us won't say about our own blogs. "Much of that traffic was never going to turn into revenue," Bodnar said. HubSpot had posts on famous quotes and how to type the shrug emoji, which drew people who were never going to buy software. It cut thousands of pages.
The scoreboard changed too. "Now we look at revenue per visit, AI share of voice, and content-influenced pipeline," he said. About 90% of HubSpot's content leads now come from channels that barely existed in its mix five years ago. The blog is about 10%.
Two caveats, both raised by the interviewer, Greg Jarboe. HubSpot sells AEO tools, so it has a stake in this story. And the big AI number, qualified leads from AI answers up 1,850% in a year, almost certainly starts from a small base. Bodnar himself calls attribution "imperfect" and the signal "correlative."
Jarboe ends with homework I'd actually do. Pull your top organic landing pages and sort them by whether they ever produced a lead, a demo or a sale. The ones that never did are the traffic you're about to lose, and you won't miss it.
Then track mentions and citations as two numbers. Being named in an AI answer and being linked from one are different things, and HubSpot counts both.
If your traffic halves next year and pipeline holds, who's going to explain to the board why that's fine?
ALSO TODAY
Gemini appears to have stopped tagging the links it cites with utm_source=gemini around September 28, Search Engine Roundtable reports, so check what your AI referral report is counting.
Apple's Safari crackdown on cross-site identifiers is pushing ad tech to move identity work onto servers, though doubts remain, Digiday reports.
Unilever's Liquid I.V. has hired Jenny Danzi, the former Poppi CMO, to lead its marketing, per Marketing Dive.
Today’s sponsor:
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TALK ON THE MARKET
Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive on proving what AI search is worth:
If your plan for proving AI search was "direct went up," Wil just took it away. HubSpot's revenue per visit is starting to look like the sensible option.
NUMBERS MATTER
36%. In-house marketers who have kept funding a channel they believed was failing, because its numbers looked too good to cut, in Funnel's Playing defense report with Ravn Research, a survey of 233 marketers, per PPC Land. And 59% prioritized work because it was easier to measure.
Funnel sells marketing data software, and PPC Land notes the report gives no fieldwork dates. Still, ask your team which line they'd cut if nobody was watching.
TRY THIS TODAY
Find your shrug-emoji pages before AI answers do.
Here are my top 200 organic landing pages with sessions and the leads, demos or deals each produced in the last 12 months.
Sort them into keep, rewrite for a buyer, or cut, and give one line of reasoning per page.Paste in: a Search Console or GA4 export of your top landing pages, joined to the leads your CRM credits to each. You get back: a three-bucket list with a reason for every page. The full Content Decay Analysis prompt goes further, with root causes and a refresh plan.
CMO CORNER
Leaders who do the work are efficient. Leaders who design the work are effective.
When the traffic number breaks, the reflex is to work harder at it. More posts, more refreshes, a weekly war room on sessions. That's doing the work.
Designing the work means changing what the team gets measured on. HubSpot moved its scoreboard to revenue per visit and pipeline, and the effort followed the new number.
This week, sit down with your content and analytics leads and agree on the one number that replaces sessions in your weekly report. Write down what it'll cost to measure. Then retire the old chart from the deck on purpose, out loud, so nobody keeps optimizing it in private.
Expect a month where people don't know if they're winning. Stay in that conversation with them. Handing down a new KPI and leaving the room is how the old one survives.
TOOL UPGRADE
Three tools for building the audience Google can't take away:
Tella — best for marketing teams turning one recording into clips for YouTube, LinkedIn and TikTok without a video editor. Try Tella here →
Buffer — best for small teams that want to publish consistently across channels without a dedicated social media manager. Try Buffer here →
Crayo AI — best for teams testing short-form video on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, from text to a finished clip in minutes. Try Crayo AI here →
→ We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.
LEARN THIS
The AI ROI Measurement Framework for Marketing is our playbook for proving what AI returns to the business: baselines, control groups, KPIs by use case and a dashboard you share with the CFO. Use it when the old traffic chart stops telling the truth and you need a number finance will accept.
First step this week: write down your baselines before anything else changes. The framework sets them 30 days before you deploy, including conversion rates and pipeline velocity.
→ We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more on AI marketing for free. Browse our learning resources for free.
BRAND SLOP
Bona Film Group says Sanxingdui: Future Past cost more than $1.5 million and took nearly 100 people over two years. Its producers bill it as China's first fully AI-generated theatrical feature. It opened on October 23 with more than 10,000 screenings scheduled. By October 26 it had taken about $181,000, Cartoon Brew reports.
"We are the first to try it, the first to get a theatrical release permit and the first to be tested by the audience," CEO Jiang Defu said, quoted via AFP by Futurism.
Meanwhile Niu Lai, a crude animated film made by a director and his mother, has grossed nearly $10 million.
Being first with AI makes a press release. It doesn't sell tickets. Is "made with AI" sitting in your next launch brief as a selling point?
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