HubSpot CMO Says Inbound Marketing is "Dead" After Losing 140 Million Visits

Kipp Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, said inbound marketing is "dead" after the company's blog lost 140 million visits in a single year, according to WebProNews. He explained that the company's revenue increased during the same period despite the decline in traffic.

Bodnar attributed the decline to artificial intelligence and frequent Google updates, stating that inbound marketing "died because it was built for a world where information was scarce," according to the report. This means that the model of attracting customers through content that answers searchers' questions is losing its effectiveness when AI answers questions directly on the search page.

The report cited data from Pew Research Center showing that users click on traditional results at a rate of 8 percent when AI overviews appear, compared to 15 percent in their absence. This gap reveals how much websites lose when the complete answer is displayed before the reader needs to click the link.

This shift exerts direct pressure on publishers and content teams in the region who built a large portion of their growth on organic search traffic. Experts believe the alternative is moving toward building a well-known brand and a direct relationship with the audience, rather than relying on a fleeting visit coming from a search engine that never returns.

What do these terms mean?

**Inbound Marketing:** A strategy that attracts customers through useful content they search for themselves, instead of direct paid ads. **AI Overviews:** Ready-made answers displayed by Google at the top of results, automatically generated from multiple sources, reducing the user's need to open websites. **Organic Search Traffic:** Unpaid visits that reach the website from organic search results.