HubSpot has announced major changes to its marketing funnel, placing greater emphasis on discovery from AI search and diversifying away from blog traffic.
On the company’s quarterly earnings call, Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot, claimed marketing is experiencing “its biggest shift in decades,” creating new opportunities.
“Two massive trends are unfolding,” said Rangan on the call. “First, organic search traffic is declining globally. AI overviews are giving answers, and fewer people are clicking through to websites.
Second, AI search is rising. More people are turning to LLM for answers instead of searching for information. And that means the way companies get found is changing rapidly.
Earlier this year, several reports suggested traffic to HubSpot’s blog had fallen as much as 80 percent. Subsequently, HubSpot’s marketing team has been testing ways to appear in more Large Language Model (LLM) queries. Rangan claimed the company is cited in LLMs more than any other CRM and is driving conversions from the channel. She also claimed just ten percent of leads now come from blog traffic.
AI is significantly impacting search, once a staple of inbound marketing campaigns. Research from Bain & Company earlier this year showed that 60 percent of searches now result in no clicks at all, as users increasingly rely on AI overviews for information. A report from Agile, which analyzed traffic drops for 23 websites after Google’s AI Overviews launched, suggested organic views dropped 18-64 percent as a result.
Gartner predicts search engine volume will drop 25 percent by 2026 as search marketing loses market share to AI chatbots and other virtual agents.
HubSpot’s Unique CRM-LLM Connectors Enjoy Healthy Early Adoption
HubSpot also announced over 20,000 customers had used its recently launched connectors with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, accessing insights across 23 million CRM records.
The connectors pull CRM insights directly into the AI for analysis, allowing sales, service, and marketing employees to search for patterns in the data and create visualizations and reports.
HubSpot’s ChatGPT connector launched in June, while the Claude integration was first introduced at the end of July.
Last month, HubSpot expanded its ChatGPT offering, extending the search functionality and enabling answers to quick questions related to HubSpot data.
HubSpot Earnings Beat Analyst Estimates, Shares Rise
Shares in HubSpot jumped around seven percent in after-hours trading following its Q2 earnings announcement. The company reported revenues rose about 19 percent year-on-year (YoY) to $760.9 million, beating analyst projections of a 16 percent increase.
Customer numbers also grew in the quarter, up 18 percent to 267,982 by the end of June, with the average customer subscription worth one percent more YoY.
“Q2 was a solid quarter for HubSpot,” Rangan concluded. “I’m pleased with our consistent execution and the momentum we’re building.”
