HubSpot Grew AI-Driven Leads by 1,850% After SEO Traffic Fell 75%

Quick Facts

• HubSpot’s organic traffic dropped from 24.4 million visits in March 2023 to 6.1 million by January 2025, a 75% decline.
• After shifting to answer engine optimization, HubSpot recorded a 1,850% increase in qualified leads from AI and a 3x higher conversion rate versus traditional search.
• HubSpot has since launched an AEO product; beta customers drove 20% more traffic from AI than non-users.

HubSpot built one of the most recognized content engines in B2B software. Then AI broke it. The company watched organic search traffic fall from 24.4 million visits in March 2023 to 6.1 million by January 2025. CEO Yamini Rangan told analysts on the Q1 2025 earnings call that organic search traffic is “declining globally” and that “AI Overviews are giving answers, and fewer people are clicking through to websites.”

HubSpot’s situation reflects a broader shift. According to data cited in the TechRadar report, 58% of Google searches now end with zero clicks. AI Overviews cut click-through rates for position-one content by an average of 58%. About 37% of consumer searches now start inside an AI app. ChatGPT logs more than 5 billion monthly visits with users spending 12 or more minutes per session.

Rather than wait, HubSpot rewired its content strategy around what it calls answer engine optimization, or AEO. The core idea: instead of ranking in search results, brands need to appear inside AI-generated answers. HubSpot’s Senior Director of Global Growth and Paid, Aja Frost, framed the shift as moving from business-to-consumer to “business to bot to consumer.”

The Three-Part Playbook

HubSpot structured its AEO work around three areas: on-site content, off-site amplification, and social diversification.

On-site, the team rewrote headings as natural language questions, placed the core answer in the first 40 to 60 words of each section, and structured content with bullets, numbered lists, and tables. Each section was made self-contained, since AI tools tend to pull individual passages rather than full pages.

Off-site, HubSpot identified publishers already earning AI citations but not mentioning HubSpot. The team gave those publishers AEO recommendations and content templates. That effort scaled to hundreds of new pages and earned hundreds of thousands of new AI citations. A separate glossary of top-of-funnel terms, each linked directly to relevant HubSpot products, increased citation share for related prompts by 60%.

On social, HubSpot invested in Reddit, YouTube, newsletters, and podcasts. Frost noted that more than half of citations for high-intent questions trace back to LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube. “Over half of citations for high-intent questions go to those three sources,” she said. The team also shifted from broad category pages to persona and use-case pages built to match the long, detailed prompts users type into tools like ChatGPT. The average ChatGPT prompt runs 23 words versus 3.37 words in traditional search.

Results and Customer Impact

The strategy produced measurable results. YouTube leads rose 100% and newsletter leads climbed 90%. Today 90% of HubSpot’s leads come from non-blog sources. Organizations broadly implementing AEO report 27% conversion rates from AI-driven traffic to sales qualified leads, with 30% higher time-on-site compared to traditional search visitors.

Sandler, a HubSpot AEO customer, reported 8,000 new website visitors in a few weeks and 12 new account conversions, a 10% increase year over year. Emily Davidson, Director of Marketing at Sandler, said those high-intent leads are “progressing faster than our typical marketing-sourced deals.”

Rangan announced HubSpot’s commercial response directly: “The companies that show up in those answers are already winning. That’s exactly why we’ve built HubSpot AEO.” The product is now available to customers, and early beta data shows a 20% traffic lift from AI for users compared to those not using the tool.

For software founders still measuring success by organic search rankings, HubSpot’s numbers make the case plainly: the channel has changed, and the playbook has to change with it.

Read more: HubSpot increased leads by 1850%, and we asked them how: The AEO playbook