When the SEO Experts Lose 70% of Their Traffic: What HubSpot’s Collapse Says About GEO

HubSpot wrote the playbook for content-led SEO. They taught a generation of marketers how to rank. Then between November 2024 and Q2 2025, HubSpot lost 70 to 80 percent of its organic traffic. On the Q1 2025 earnings call, CEO Yamini Rangan blamed Google AI Overviews for answering questions before anyone clicks. WHAT, industry analysis citing the call. WHO, Demand Local, marketing analyst firm. WHEN, May 2026.

If HubSpot can lose three-quarters of its search traffic without losing rankings, the SEO playbook needs an autopsy.

Why this is not a ranking problem

The Week 8 content defines SEO as improving website visibility in organic search. That definition assumed visibility produced clicks. It no longer does. Seer Interactive’s September 2025 study found organic CTR dropped 61 percent on queries with AI Overviews, from 1.76 percent to 0.61 percent. WHAT, original agency research. WHO, Seer Interactive analytics team. WHEN, September 2025. Rankings stayed flat. Clicks did not.

Industry calls this the Great Decoupling. A page can rank first, appear in the AI Overview, and still lose the user to the answer.

Where E-E-A-T enters the picture

The lecture introduced Google’s E-E-A-T framework: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. The framework was built to rank pages. It now decides who gets cited in AI summaries. Position Digital reported in April 2026 that 76.1 percent of URLs cited in AI Overviews also rank in Google’s top 10. WHAT, statistics aggregation from a UK SEO agency. WHO, Position Digital analysts. WHEN, April 2026. Ranking still matters. It just no longer pays out in clicks.

This is where the lecture’s coverage of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) becomes central. GEO asks marketers to write content AI will summarize and cite. The E-E-A-T signals from the slides, expert authors, structured data, citations, are now inputs to AI’s decision about whose words to use.

Where the theory needs sharpening

GEO is presented in the slides as an evolution of SEO. The HubSpot case suggests it is closer to a replacement for the click-driven half of SEO. Two assumptions in the lecture deserve pressure.

First, the slides treat E-E-A-T as a quality signal. In a zero-click world it is a citation lottery ticket. Pew Research found in July 2025 that only 1 percent of searches lead to a user clicking a link inside an AI Overview.

Second, the slides frame organic and paid as complementary. The HubSpot data shows they can collapse together. Seer Interactive measured a 68 percent paid CTR drop on AI Overview queries alongside the 61 percent organic drop. When AI eats the answer, it eats both columns.

Reflection

HubSpot’s response was telling. In April 2026, the company launched its own AEO tool to help customers appear inside ChatGPT and Gemini answers. WHAT, ad-tech industry news. WHO, PPC Land. WHEN, April 2026. The SEO leader had to build a product to escape SEO.

The lesson for marketers is simple. Optimise for citation, not clicks. Treat ranking as the entry ticket, not the prize.