TL;DR

Last year, the marketing internet held a funeral for HubSpot. The company that taught us all inbound marketing lost roughly three-quarters of its blog traffic to AI search, and every hot take said the same thing: if it can happen to HubSpot, owned media is dead.

Then, HubSpot closed the year with $3.13 billion in revenue, up 19%, and 16% more customers.

The obituary measured the wrong thing. Traffic was never the moat—the system was. AI didn’t kill HubSpot’s owned media; it repossessed the borrowed parts, and everything built on real authority held.

Episode 4 of the PESO Model® Diagnostic looks at the first brand in this series to take a direct hit—and what the blast did and didn’t destroy.

Key Insights

HubSpot’s organic traffic fell from roughly 13.5 million monthly visits to 8.6 million at the end of 2024, and third-party tools measured a 75–81% decline in blog traffic by mid-2025. Fiscal year 2025 revenue grew 19% to $3.13 billion anyway. The traffic and the business were never the same thing.
The traffic AI took wasn’t random—it was concentrated in content HubSpot never had the right to own: famous quotes, resignation letter templates, search-volume plays far from its expertise. The content backed by two decades of real authority held.
The moat was never the blog. It’s the system around it: 200,000+ Academy-certified professionals, an award-winning owned conference, proprietary research the whole industry cites, an acquired media company, and a podcast—every channel feeding the others. That’s an operating system, not a content calendar.
In the AI era, the metric that matters isn’t how many humans visit your content—it’s how often the machines cite it. HubSpot is the most-cited vendor blog in its category, and its own restructuring experiment increased AI citations by 642%. This is engineerable, not luck.
Measurement is what lets HubSpot’s CMO stare down the scariest traffic chart in marketing and point calmly at customer growth. Only 28% of CMOs feel they have real organizational influence—largely because they can’t draw that line from content to revenue. He can.
HubSpot didn’t just survive the shift—it productized it, selling AEO tools within 18 months of taking the punch. That’s a Stage 5, Leadership-level operating system: the crisis becomes the product.
The lesson scales to any budget: one genuinely authoritative content hub instead of ten volume plays, one owned community touchpoint, one piece of research your industry has to cite.

The PESO Model® Diagnostic: How HubSpot Turned Owned Media Into a Moat

You probably saw the headlines. Sometime in early 2025, the entire marketing internet gathered to sit shiva for the HubSpot blog.

The numbers were brutal. SEMRush data showed HubSpot’s organic traffic dropped from about 13.5 million monthly visits to 8.6 million at the end of 2024, with the blog absorbing most of the damage.

By mid-2025, third-party analyses estimated the blog’s year-over-year decline at 75–81%. The company that wrote the inbound marketing playbook—the company that taught an entire generation of us that content brings customers—was watching AI Overviews and ChatGPT eat its traffic in public.

And the takes wrote themselves. If it can happen to HubSpot, it can happen to anyone. Content marketing is dead. Owned media is dead. Pack it up, everyone, the robots won.

But then…

Dun, dun, dun!

HubSpot reported its full-year results: $3.13 billion in revenue, up 19%, with 288,706 customers—16% more than the year before.

Huh.

The conversation we should have been having was NOT whether HubSpot was dying; it was why it didn’t—and what that tells you about the difference between owned media as a traffic engine and owned media as a moat.

That’s what we’ll focus this month’s PESO Model® Diagnostic on. Once a month, I run a high-visibility, award-winning brand through the PESO Operating System lens—not to dunk on great work, but to show you the gap between what looks finished and what actually compounds.

Episode 1 was Budweiser, where the biggest paid moment of the year still didn’t add up to a system.

Episode 2 was Liquid Death, the rare brand whose operating system is the product.

Episode 3 was Peppa Pig, a perfect campaign that still wasn’t quite a system, not because it wasn’t brilliant (it was), but because it didn’t extend beyond nine months.

Episode 4 is different again. This is the first one where the brand took a direct hit—the exact hit we are all terrified of—and we get to examine what the blast did and didn’t destroy.

After three consumer brands, it’s also time for a B2B subject. Because if you’ve been following along with the CMO influence crisis and last week’s visibility engineering playbook, HubSpot is the living case study of everything we’ve been talking about.

What HubSpot Actually Built

I want to inventory the whole system, because the blog is the only part anyone talks about, and it might actually be the least interesting part (bestill my content marketing heart!).

Let’s start with their content library, which is their most famous piece.

For the better part of two decades, HubSpot has published its way into being the default answer for every marketing question on the internet. How to write a news release. What is a KPI? Blog post templates, email subject line formulas, the works.

At its peak, that engine pulled in more than 13 million organic visits a month—traffic most media companies would kill for, attached to a software company.

But look at what got built around it.

HubSpot Academy has certified more than 200,000 professionals—people who put HubSpot credentials on their LinkedIn profiles and resumes, which means HubSpot’s owned education became other people’s professional identity.

(Sit with that one for a second. Your owned media, on their resume. It’s what we’re doing, too, with the PESO Model® Certification.)

INBOUND, the annual conference, drew more than 11,250 attendees to San Francisco in 2025 and was named one of BizBash’s Most Innovative Meetings—an owned event so established, it functions as an industry institution.

(It’s being rebranded UNBOUND for 2026 and heading back to Boston, because of course a company this comfortable with reinvention would rename and reverse engineer its own crown jewel.)

The annual State of Marketing report and a steady stream of proprietary research give journalists, consultants, and conference speakers—including, ahem, some of us—data to cite all year long.

HubSpot acquired The Hustle to add a media company’s newsletter audience to the portfolio. The Marketing Against the Grain podcast puts its CMO and SVP of marketing in your ears every week. And at INBOUND 2025, the company introduced loop marketing—its post-funnel playbook for a world where “AI sits between your brand and your buyer.”

That’s not a blog. That’s an owned media economy.

Credit Where It’s Due

But before we get to the diagnosis, let’s appreciate all of the many things they did right. Things that most brands never even attempt.

They built owned media the business runs on, not alongside. The Academy doesn’t just educate—it certifies the people who then advocate for buying HubSpot inside their companies.

The research doesn’t just inform—it earns citations that build authority, lowering acquisition costs.

Content isn’t a department at HubSpot. It’s infrastructure.

They started the pivot before the crisis. Kipp Bodnar, HubSpot’s CMO, says the company began shifting from “information to influence” back in 2020—moving investment into YouTube, podcasts, creators, and the Academy years before AI search made “what is a KPI?” content worthless.

You can quibble with how complete that pivot was (I will, in a minute), but the direction was right, and it was early.

They can also draw the line from content to revenue.

When the traffic collapsed, Bodnar’s response was essentially that traffic was never the metric they ran the business on, which is exactly right.

That is either spin (I hope not!) or the single most enviable sentence a CMO can say—and the earnings suggest it wasn’t spin.

When your measurement connects content to pipeline, a vanity metric can die without taking your credibility with it. This is the measurement problem solved, in the wild.

They metabolized the crisis into product.

By April 2026, HubSpot had launched AEO tools—software that tracks how brands show up in AI answers—plus a free AEO Grader and a State of AEO research report. They took the punch, studied it, and started selling the defense.

And here’s where the diagnostic gets interesting.

The PESO Lens: What Survived, What Didn’t

Unlike Budweiser, the integration here is real. And unlike Peppa Pig, there’s no finale—the system is always on.

So this diagnostic question is sharper: when the worst-case scenario actually happened, which parts of the operating system held?

Let’s go through it.

Owned Media

Here’s the part of the story almost nobody told. The traffic AI took wasn’t random—it was concentrated in the content furthest from HubSpot’s actual expertise: famous quote roundups, resignation letter templates, shorthand-abbreviation explainers. Search volume plays.

Content HubSpot created because it could rank, not because it had any particular right to be the authority. That’s the content AI Overviews now answer directly, and that traffic evaporated.

The content built on real expertise—the marketing, sales, and CRM material HubSpot has two decades of credibility behind it—is what held. AI didn’t kill HubSpot’s owned media. It repossessed the borrowed parts.

There’s a lesson in that for every content program that ever chased volume: authority you rent gets taken back.

Earned Media

HubSpot’s earned media engine barely resembles a media relations program—it’s a citation machine.

The research reports earn coverage. The data earns podium mentions in other people’s keynotes. And now, the machines have joined the media list: one study of more than 17,000 AI-engine citations found HubSpot was the most-cited vendor blog in its category, sharing the leaderboard with Wikipedia and Reddit.

In the AI era, earned media includes being the source that answer engines trust. HubSpot got there the old-fashioned way—by publishing things worth citing.

Shared Media

The Academy alumni base, The Hustle’s audience, the podcast listeners, the 11,000 people who fly to a conference every year—this is shared media as community, not as a posting calendar.

Notice the difference from Peppa Pig’s 61 million TikTok views. That was sharing about an event. HubSpot’s shared layer is pinned to ongoing relationships, which is why it didn’t blink when the traffic fell.

Paid Media

The quietest layer, and mostly deliberately so, paid at HubSpot amplifies proof (research, tools, the Academy) rather than buying awareness.

When 95% of what AI engines cite comes from non-paid sources, a paid-heavy strategy can’t save you anyway. Paid’s job in this system is to accelerate what the other channels have already validated.

Integration

Their flywheel is real, and you can trace it.

It works like this:

Research earns citations
Citations build authority
Authority makes the Academy credible
The Academy certifies evangelists
Evangelists fill INBOUND
INBOUND generates a year of content and product news, which feeds the research.

Every channel feeds the others. That’s exactly what you want because an operating system feeds itself.

This is what that looks like at scale.

Measurement

And last, but certainly not least, measurement.

HubSpot could lose its most famous marketing asset’s headline metric and calmly point to customer growth, because the measurement spine connects content to business outcomes.

Compare that to the Lippincott data we looked at two weeks ago—only 28% of CMOs feel they have real organizational influence, largely because they can’t draw that line.

Bodnar can.

That’s the whole ballgame.

What Even HubSpot’s System Leaves Open

So let’s assume they sit at the top of the PESO Model Maturity Level, which is Stage 5, or Leadership. It means their operating system is their competitive advantage. They are crushing it.

And I have three honest observations from my PESO lens.

First, the traffic bloat was a choice. Them being able to say, “We never cared about vanity metrics,” is a great line, but you don’t accumulate millions of visits from famous-quotes traffic by accident—somebody chased that volume for years because it was working.

The generous read is that every mature system accumulates barnacles during the good times, and the real test is how fast you scrape them off when the environment changes.

HubSpot passed that test.

But the cleaner lesson for your team is not to build barnacles in the first place. If a piece of content ranks but doesn’t reinforce your actual authority, it’s not an asset. It’s exposure. Maybe not right now, but it will be eventually.

Single-platform dependence had to hurt before it got fixed. For all the “pivot started in 2020” framing, HubSpot was still carrying 13.5 million monthly Google-dependent visits into late 2024.

The diversification was real but partial—and the correction, when it came, came all at once.

If your owned media strategy has one distribution channel doing most of the work (Google then, maybe LinkedIn or one newsletter platform for you now), you have the same exposure.

The time to diversify is while the incumbent channel still works.

The moat is expensive, and that’s the point.

Two decades, an acquired media company, a certification academy, and an annual conference.

You can’t replicate that by Friday, no matter how much you would like to (same). But the architecture scales down to each of us.

You can do it if you have one genuinely authoritative content hub instead of 10 volume plays, one owned community touchpoint, and one piece of research your industry has to cite.

The Principle That Travels

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

If your traffic disappeared tomorrow, what would still be true? HubSpot lost the traffic and kept the authority, the community, the certifications, and the citations. Run the thought experiment on your own program. Strip away every visit, and inventory what remains. If the answer is “not much,” you’ve been building a traffic engine, not a moat—and you now know exactly what you need to do in the next 12 months. (Which, BTW, is something we help people and organizations do, either through the PESO Model Certification or via our white glove service.)
Are you creating content you have the right to own? The famous-quotes graveyard is the most instructive example of content failure in the AI era. Before your next piece, ask whether you’re the credible authority on it or just an available answer. AI keeps the authorities and replaces the availables. If you aren’t ready to hire us, last week’s visibility engineering playbook walks through how you can build the kind of organization that the machines cite.
When the machines answer for your category, are you the citation? Traffic is a human metric. Citation is the machine-era one. HubSpot restructured its content and increased its AI citations by 642%, which tells you this is engineerable, not luck. Somebody will be the source AI engines trust for your category’s questions. The only question is whether it’s you or your competitor.

HubSpot took the hit every CEO has nightmares about, and the business grew 19% anyway.

Not because it was lucky. Because the system was never the traffic.