Between November and December 2024, HubSpot lost nearly 5 million monthly visitors. Before the company launched its new LOOP methodology in September 2025, multiple industry analytics tools reported the company had shed roughly three-quarters of its organic traffic.
For a company synonymous with content marketing excellence, the decline sent shockwaves through the industry. If HubSpot could lose most of its traffic despite a decade of investment and expertise, what did that mean for everyone else?
But the headlines missed something critical. HubSpot’s revenue didn’t collapse. The company didn’t panic. Their response reveals what the traffic drop really represented: evidence that HubSpot had already evolved past the world where traffic alone mattered most.
Their reaction reflects the direction of the wider B2B landscape, where customer experience is paramount. Optimal CX isn't solely about marketing, let alone traffic. Instead, it centers on providing complete solutions that align with how businesses grow and how customers build relationships with brands.HubSpot's evolution mirrors our own at HexaGroup. We started as a marketing agency, then evolved into a growth agency for the same reason HubSpot expanded from blog software to a full CRM platform: our clients needed integrated systems. Today, our Growth Engine methodology spans branding, marketing, sales, and service because sustainable growth requires all four functions working as one closed-loop system, each function feeding the others and creating efficiency that improves with every cycle.
Act one: Starting simple
In 2006, MIT graduate students Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah founded HubSpot around a simple premise: create valuable content, rank for what your audience searches for, and capture attention through helpfulness rather than interruption.
The strategy worked. HubSpot’s blog drove traffic, which generated leads, validated the approach, and drove more growth. By 2010, revenue had exploded.
HubSpot executed what many considered the gold standard B2B content strategy. They published prolifically, targeted high-volume keywords, and built topical coverage across as many queries as possible. The blog became a traffic machine, pulling millions of monthly visitors.
But somewhere along the way, the strategy drifted. HubSpot began publishing content far outside its core expertise: famous sales quotes, cover letter templates, resignation letter examples. A “shrug emoji” post pulled hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors. These pages drove massive traffic and had almost nothing to do with what HubSpot actually sold.
Then the game changed.
Act two: Thinking differently
By 2014, HubSpot had expanded beyond marketing software, launching Sales Hub, Free CRM, and eventually Service Hub in 2018. This reflected a deeper shift in how HubSpot thought about growth.
Marketing couldn’t drive sustainable revenue on its own. The handoff from marketing to sales created friction. Prospects fell through the cracks. Data lived in silos. Marketing measured leads, sales measured deals, and nobody had a complete picture of which prospects converted.
HubSpot’s answer was to become the system of record for the entire revenue operation, connecting marketing, sales, and branding through shared data and workflows.
HubSpot evolved from a blog company into a CRM company. Buyers had changed. They expected seamless experiences across marketing, sales, and service, judging companies on the complete journey rather than individual touchpoints. This forced marketing to expand beyond lead generation and operate as part of the entire revenue cycle. Traffic still mattered, but now as one input in a larger system.
Act three: The LOOP era
In 2025, HubSpot launched Breeze, its AI embedded across the entire platform, and introduced LOOP Marketing. LOOP represents a continuous cycle, in which every interaction feeds back into the system. Prospects engage with content, which informs how sales approaches them. Sales conversations shape how marketing positions the offering. Customer usage patterns guide product development.
As Kipp Bodnar, HubSpot’s Chief Marketing Officer, explained at INBOUND 2024: “The old funnel assumed customers would come to you. But when 60% of searches never leave Google and AI is answering questions before prospects click, that playbook is broken. The LOOP meets customers everywhere they are and turns every interaction into a learning opportunity.”
The LOOP methodology has four stages: Express (define your brand identity), Tailor (personalize with AI), Amplify (optimize for both humans and AI platforms), and Evolve (iterate in real time). AI accelerates the cycle by surfacing content at the right moment, scoring leads on actual behavior, and identifying patterns humans would need significantly more time to identify..
HubSpot had shifted from a model where visibility drove growth to a model where learning systems drive growth. When AI overviews started replacing search clicks in late 2024, HubSpot’s content didn’t disappear. It got cited. According to MarTech's analysis, HubSpot appears frequently when AI platforms respond to CRM and marketing automation queries.
How HubSpot corrected course
Google’s late 2024 algorithm updates prioritized content tied to core expertise. HubSpot’s off-topic content got devalued. Pages that once ranked on page one disappeared. According to SEO analyst Aleyda Solis, the blog went from generating the majority of organic traffic to less than half within months.
AI Overviews compounded the problem. Google began answering informational queries directly in search results. High-volume, low-depth content became nearly worthless overnight.
HubSpot didn’t scramble to reclaim rankings. Despite the traffic decline, revenue increased by more than 20% year over year in its February 2025 earnings announcement. The disconnect confirmed what many suspected: much of that traffic had never converted to business value.
HubSpot now prioritizes being cited in AI-generated responses over driving clicks. Traffic from AI platforms is growing, though it remains much smaller than traditional organic search traffic.
What industrial marketers should learn from this
Most industrial companies still operate with marketing creating content, sales working deals, brand setting the storytelling framework, and service handling problems. Each function tracks its own metrics while handoffs create friction and silos create blind spots.
HubSpot's evolution proves that companies can lose most of their traffic and still grow by diversifying how prospects discover and engage with them. They expanded where and how they captured attention. When marketing and sales share data, conversion rates improve because sales knows what resonated before contact. When service feeds insights back to marketing, you create content that reflects what customers actually care about. When the system learns continuously, every interaction improves the next.
This is what we call the edge-to-engine philosophy: integrating brand, marketing, sales, and service into a seamless system that enhances the customer experience at every touchpoint. Just like the physics of flight, growth requires pulling at the wingtips while controlling from the core. When these functions operate as one engine rather than separate departments, the outcome compounds.
Industrial buyers care whether you understand their specific challenges and have solved similar problems before. That authority comes from going deep on the problems you solve, for the customers you serve, in the markets where you compete.
Industrial companies need to become the source that AI platforms refer to when prospects ask technical questions.
Growth is engineered
HubSpot spent years optimizing for traffic, even when much of it never converted. The correction forced every industrial brand to ask: What are we optimizing for?
If the answer is traffic or rankings, the strategy drifts toward breadth. If the answer is qualified pipeline or revenue, the strategy moves toward depth. This approach entails taking a broader view of growth that connects branding, marketing, sales, and service. This is where HexaGroup's Growth Engine methodology mirrors HubSpot's own evolution. Just as HubSpot moved from isolated marketing software to an integrated platform where sales, service, and marketing share unified customer data, the Growth Engine operates on the principle that sustainable growth requires brand, marketing, sales, and service to work as a single closed-loop system.
Brand establishes the positioning that shapes how prospects discover you. Marketing creates the closed-loop campaigns that generate a qualified pipeline. Sales converts using the complete customer context. Service delivers the retention and expansion that compounds revenue over time. Each function feeds the others, creating efficiency that improves with every cycle, which is the same principle behind HubSpot's LOOP methodology.
Let’s talk about your HubSpot strategy
At HexaGroup, we’re a HubSpot Platinum Partner with more than 20 years of experience helping energy and industrial firms build the integrated systems that HubSpot itself spent two decades evolving. We don’t just implement platforms. We engineer growth systems with HubSpot at the center of our tech stack.
Whether you’re evaluating HubSpot for the first time, stuck with an underperforming implementation that’s become a glorified email tool, or ready to engineer a complete growth system that compounds learning across every function, we help you move faster and more confidently.
HubSpot learned this lesson the hard way, through traffic losses and platform pivots spanning two decades. You get to skip straight to the advanced system.
Growth is engineered. Here and now.
Ready for takeoff?
