The SaaS SEO Mistake That Cost HubSpot 80% of Its Traffic
When ‘More Content’ Backfires on Scale
In early 2024, something wild happened:
HubSpot—the $30B SaaS giant, content marketing royalty—lost over 80% of its blog traffic.
According to multiple sources (including HubSpot), the drop started in March and nosedived by April.
This wasn’t a seasonal dip. Not a tech glitch.
This was a full-blown signal: the content game changed.
And if it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone.
How Bad Was It?
From a distance? Pretty brutal.
They went from ranking top 3 for 138,000 keywords to just 30,000.
A 78% drop. That’s Surfer SEO’s number.
But let’s zoom in.
First: not every keyword was a moneymaker.
Yeah, they lost rankings for big stuff like “quotes” (223K/month). That hurts.
But they also lost a ton of fluff—low-volume, niche terms.
Second: not all #1s disappeared, some just moved.
Example: this “marketing strategy template”
It now ranks on a different subdomain.
So traffic didn’t vanish. It shifted.
Third: most of what dropped wasn’t bottom-funnel.
Out of ~2M keywords they ranked for, only 479K were commercial.
Now? 305K.
So yeah, they lost some key queries, but a lot weren’t driving sales anyway. 🤷🏽♂
What Did HubSpot Say?
To their credit, they owned it.
The drop crushed older posts hardest, some from way back.
But they’ve since pivoted. Less top-of-funnel blogging.
More brand-building: podcasts, video, and big-name plays like The Hustle.
As they put it:
"We’ve been focused on shifting from informational content to content that influences our audience more directly."
Translation? They updated their approach. Google reacted.
How the Industry Reacted
A lot of SEOs didn’t buy the “strategy shift” story.
Some say they got hit by stricter standards.
Others blame bloat, over-optimisation, or AI overload.
But let’s break it down.
1. The Blog Got Bloated
“80% of their content is just 20% of their content repeated.”
— u/PhotographAble5006 on Reddit
Ouch. But not wrong.
When you publish at scale for years, overlap creeps in.
Listicles, explainers, beginner guides — they start to blur.
Even if each post is technically different, it feels the same.
To Google, that’s noise.
So when they cleaned house, it exposed how thin the blog had gotten.
Less content ≠ better content.
And Google noticed.
2. AI Changed the Game
“I've moved 90% of my searches to ChatGPT.”
— u/ToughRepublicf on Reddit
It’s not just you.
A ton of people are skipping Google and going straight to ChatGPT or Perplexity.
Faster. More direct. Often better.
That means a huge chunk of traffic that used to land on blogs like HubSpot’s... never even makes it to Google anymore.
This is a user behavior shift, and it’s bigger than any algo update.
3. Google’s Tired of ‘Just-for-Traffic’ Content
“Google doesn’t want you publishing topics that are ‘too far astray’ just for the sake of getting traffic.”
— Gaetano DiNardi (Growth Advisor)
Hubspot’s old playbook: publish everything with search volume.
Marketing-adjacent? Good enough.
But over time, that led to a topical drift.
Blog posts on productivity hacks, HR templates, business quotes...
Sure, they got traffic.
Relevance? Not so much.
The Helpful Content updates hit that hard.
Now, Google’s asking: is this actually useful to your audience?
And if the answer’s…
It’s game over.
So... What Was the Mistake?
Let’s bring it back to the headline.
The mistake wasn’t just bloated posts or AI overuse.
It was hanging on too long to a traffic-first, awareness-only SEO model.
That approach worked in 2017.
It doesn’t work now.
Here’s why:
It bloated the blog with repetitive, low-value content
It pulled in big traffic, but not buyer traffic
It didn’t evolve with how users now search (think AI tools)
It kept feeding volume, not relevance or trust
That’s the SaaS SEO mistake:
Chasing more traffic, instead of better alignment.
And it’s the kind of mistake that quietly snowballs…
until you’re down 80%.
So What Can You Learn From This?
Here’s what I’d be doing if I were you:
✅ Stop writing for traffic, start writing for users
✅ Don’t post just to hit a content quota
✅ Keep older content fresh, but don’t gut it blindly
✅ Align every post with what your actual audience needs
✅ And above all — build trust, not just pageviews
Because if HubSpot, with all their resources, can get wiped out like this… then the rest of us need to get smarter, faster.