For many years, when other marketers sought an example of effective SEO, they turned to HubSpot. At its height, the blog generated content on an industrial scale, ranked for thousands of high-intent keywords, and had over 13 million organic visits each month. It wasn’t merely a success. It was a model. Then, about five million of those monthly visits vanished between November and December of 2024. The figure had decreased even more by the beginning of 2025; depending on whose calculation you believe, it was between six and eight million. In just a few weeks, a company that had spent years instructing other businesses on SEO had turned into a warning.
HubSpot’s demise wasn’t the result of a straightforward execution error or an abrupt loss of judgment. It was more fundamental in nature, a collision between an environment that had changed beneath a content strategy designed for one search period. When Google’s AI Overviews feature was introduced in May 2024, it started to consume the traffic that informational content had been drawing for a while. Google now often provides immediate answers to queries on how to write a cold email or what a CRM performs in a box at the top of the page, without ever directing the visitor to a website. The foundation of HubSpot’s comprehensive, well-written, and genuinely helpful content collection was the idea that ranking for those informative searches would result in visitors. It was no longer a reliable assumption.
Forbes encountered an alternative iteration of the same lesson. Its decline—an expected 60–80% decrease in organic visibility between 2024 and 2025—was partially caused by a Google manual action that targeted “Site Reputation Abuse.” It was discovered that Forbes Advisor, the affiliate marketing division that had been ranking commercial product recommendations under Forbes’ authoritative domain, was disseminating third-party material in ways that conflated sponsored promotion with journalism. That line was drawn sharply by Google. The penalty not only had an impact on Forbes Advisor but also threw a shadow over the entire industry, serving as a reminder that when the fundamental material quality deteriorates, a large brand’s credibility that has been built over decades may be lost very rapidly.
In both situations, there is a pattern that is worth considering. Neither business gave up on SEO right away. Neither of them made a single disastrous choice. What transpired was more akin to slow-motion degradation, the kind of thing that can be easily disregarded quarter by quarter until the figures abruptly became unavoidable. A portion of HubSpot’s problem stemmed from a content approach that gave volume precedence over depth, resulting in articles that provided sufficient but unremarkable answers to queries. That strategy became less competitive when AI Overviews started snatching up the more straightforward informational requests and Google’s algorithm began rewarding real expertise and first-hand perspective more highly. Forbes’ problem stemmed in part from their belief that brand prominence would serve as a safeguard against transgressions of editorial standards. It didn’t.
The larger figures imply that neither business is in isolation. Between 2024 and 2025, 73% of B2B websites saw major declines in organic traffic. Nowadays, 60% of Google searches result in no click to an external website. That percentage rises to 77% on mobile. In January 2025, AI Overviews made up about 6.5% of queries; by March, that percentage had more than doubled to 13%. Companies that created content with true original perspectives, such as private data, direct expert commentary, or lived institutional knowledge, as opposed to keyword-optimized text that a computer can now summarize without attribution, are best positioned to resist this change.
