HubSpot has lost over 5.6 million in organic traffic since September 2024. (Ahrefs data)
They had 7.6 million monthly visitors in September 2024. They now have only 2 million as of January 2025. That’s a 73.68% dip in traffic. Welcome to the club, HubSpot!
Many people say it’s due to a lack of topical authority and content depth. After Google’s recent updates, they’re cracking down on these.
If you look at HubSpot’s traffic on a wider scale, it’s actually much worse. They had over 9.6 million traffic as of Dec 2023.
Counting from December of 2023 to January of 2025, they’ve lost a ridiculous 7.6 million organic visitors… Ouch. Let’s look more into why their traffic dipped so much.
Why Did HubSpot Lose So Many Visitors?
There are many speculations out there—but most think it’s because HubSpot has been creating thin content on irrelevant topics. Recent changes in the Google Algorithm penalize this more than before.
Broad, surface-level articles created for clicks instead of relevance are now being hit pretty hard by Google. You can’t just write about random topics for the sole purpose of getting traffic anymore.
HubSpot focuses a lot on trending but irrelevant topics (like famous quotes and resignation letters). This most likely diluted their topical authority. These topics, among others, are irrelevant to their niche.
What Are People Saying About HubSpot’s Losses?
The majority of people seem to be saying it’s because of HubSpot’s lack of expertise on certain topics. They frequently publish content that’s too far outside of their niche.
Google realizes this, and with the recent changes in the algorithm, they’re prioritizing expertise on specific topics much more than before.
One Reddit user says: “Probably AI Overviews. A lot of their content is TOFU“.
This isn’t a stretch, considering AI overviews have been making increasingly more appearances in SERPs over the last year. However, I doubt it would affect their site that dramatically.
If this were true, there would be hundreds of thousands of other websites with similar losses. I think overviews probably had an impact, but aren’t the sole reason.
It’s also pretty relevant that HubSpot’s blog was hit the most. Their main domain’s traffic trend stayed (somewhat) steady. This is another indication that whatever the issue was, their blogs were most at fault.
Another user said “80% of their content is just 20% of their content repeated.”
HubSpot is definitely guilty of this too. If your website’s content is too similar, it could negatively impact rankings. But again, I doubt it would equate to a 5.6 million drop in traffic.
So, Where Did HubSpot’s Traffic Actually Go?
Energy cannot be created or destroyed. That saying reigns true, even in the SEO world. Those 5.6 million visitors didn’t just vanish. They have to go somewhere, right?
Absolutely. According to Ahrefs, that traffic is now going to other websites like:
- Canva
- Zapier
- Microsoft
- Wikipedia
- Adobe
- Indeed
- DeepAI
Ahref’s “Traffic share by domain” report shows exactly which sites are now ranking for the keywords that HubSpot lost. There are likely thousands of other sites that benefited in smaller amounts.
What Else Did HubSpot Lose as a Result of Their SEO Collapse?
Losing 5M traffic is one thing. Let’s look at all the other metrics that they lost as a result of this.
→ Traffic Value: It plummeted from $9.5M to $1.7M
→ Keyword rankings: Fell from 9.7 million keywords to 2 million
→ Visitors: As we know dropped from 7.6 million visitors to 2 million
→ Impressions: Went from 130 million to 31 million
→ Branded keywords: Fell from 1 million to 250K
How Google Updates May Have Affected HubSpot
No one is immune to the Google gods. The December 2024 core update and spam update seem to be major players in HubSpot’s SEO collapse.
These updates push Google’s focus toward rewarding in-depth, expert-written content while penalizing anything “thin” or off-topic.
HubSpot’s habit of creating articles on broad topics—like famous quotes and resignation letters—probably hurt their topical authority.
It’s likely Google saw this content as irrelevant to HubSpot’s core focus. Then, it caused their rankings and traffic to drop. Google’s Helpful Content System also plays a big role.
It’s designed to prioritize content that’s actually useful and relevant for users. If a site has a lot of unhelpful content, it can drag down even the good stuff. Bad news for big players like HubSpot.
HubSpot’s situation shows how important creating content that’s relevant to your niche is. The oldest rule in the SEO book has always been quality over quantity—obviously HubSpot neglected that.
What I’d Do If I Were HubSpot
I’m not the Head of Content for HubSpot. But I can still tell you what I would do if I were them. It’ll be hard to correct 5 million lost visitors—but here are some things I think would be a good idea:
- Eliminate irrelevant content. Redirect or delete pages that HubSpot doesn’t really have expertise in.
- Pause content creation. Hold off for at least 3 months to fix some foundational issues.
- Update critical pages. Replace fluff with actionable content and credible, expert-driven content. Not random irrelevant topics.
- Audit outgoing links. Start with top pages—Google’s spam update could be hurting them.
- Rethink author credibility. Remove contributors who don’t meet Google standards.
- Pray: Because regardless of what you do, it’s still primarily out of your control. It will be difficult to regain traffic at the level it was once at.
Learn From HubSpot, Don’t Make The Mistakes They Did
In the world of SEO, things change a lot. There are constant algorithm updates. AI-written content is on the rise. AI Overviews are becoming more and more common. Our job is hard enough.
Instead of making your own mistakes, look at what others are doing wrong. It’s much easier than screwing up on your own.
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