I took a look at the HubSpot search decline

There's a screenshot circulating online showing how HubSpot lost a significant number of visitors in recent months (hat tip to Ryan for pointing it out):

As you can imagine many people started panicking and claiming that search is a dead channel because with AI no one is going to click on your site anymore.

But if you take a closer look at what’s actually happening you’ll notice that the pages losing the most traffic are on topics outside HubSpot's core expertise like "how to write a resignation letter.”

Check what’s ranking for those queries now and you’ll see companies whose core business revolves around work. Indeed, Michael Page, etc.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence but most likely it’s not.

It’s not AI overviews causing this dramatic decline. If it were we’d see similar effects across many other sites (and I’d expect it to be more gradual too).

In this case it seems pretty clear that a Google update impacted the site. All those discussions about focusing on people-first content in areas where you have authority and expertise aren’t just nice to have. They’re critical.

Now let’s focus on all that lost traffic. It’s not like those visitors disappeared. They were simply redistributed to other (more relevant) sites.

So next to that dramatic declining chart we could pair charts of other sites growing because they inherited those rankings.

As a user when I search for a query like that I’d rather find a result written by a recruiting company than by an unrelated software tool.

Instead of saying that search is dying maybe we should say that it’s actually getting better.