This week we attended HubSpot’s GROW event in London, where CMO Kipp Bodnar revealed something that caught the entire industry’s attention:

👉 HubSpot lost more than 140 million website visits this year… and still grew.

This isn’t a HubSpot problem — it’s a market reality. AI has fundamentally rewritten how people discover, research, and make buying decisions.

In this article, we will share his insights in this break down:

1. Why inbound marketing as we know it is breaking
2. The rise of AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
3. Why AI-driven visitors convert up to 13x better
4. How Loop Marketing replaces the traditional funnel
5. How HubSpot is giving businesses the tools to adapt

Let’s dive in.

1. AI Is Intercepting the Customer Journey

The biggest disruption is happening at the top and middle of the funnel.

🔍 Before

People searched on Google, read blog posts, visited websites, and moved through a predictable journey.

🤖 Now

People ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini.

They get answers instantly — often generated from your content — without ever visiting your site.

This means:

• Search volume is not converting into website traffic
• Traditional SEO is becoming less reliable
• Brands are losing visibility unless they appear in AI answers

Yet this shift comes with a surprising upside…

2. AI Traffic Converts 13x Better

HubSpot's data shows:

🔥 Visitors from ChatGPT and other AI sources convert 13x better than Google Search.

Why?
Because AI-assisted buyers arrive pre-qualified.

They’ve already asked questions.
They’ve compared solutions.
They understand their problem.
And they arrive with intent.

Traffic is declining — but quality has never been higher. And as we always tell all of our customer, quality is better than quantity.

This means your website, messaging, and personalization must be ready for high-intent users.

And this is where things get really interesting…

3. SEO → AEO: The New Visibility Battlefield

AI tools don’t show “10 blue links.” They give one answer.

That means your brand is:

✅ Mentioned
❌ Or completely invisible

There is no second page.

What determines visibility in AI?

Two metrics now matter more than rankings:

• Brand Mentions in AI responses
• Citations (links your site gets from AI systems).

HubSpot adapted quickly — and their AEO traffic grew from near-zero to 10%+ of total traffic in a single year.

Businesses that ignore this shift will lose visibility faster than they think.

Backlinks and reviews still matter? Yes of course, and will help AEO find you faster. 

4. Why the Traditional Funnel Is Breaking

The funnel was built for a linear path: Content → Traffic → Lead → Customer

But AI has rerouted the journey. Discovery, evaluation, comparison, and decision-making now happen before the website visit.

Inbound isn’t dead — but the old inbound playbook is.

To survive this shift, HubSpot built a new model, the Loop Marketing framework that we had already tell you about in this article.

Loop Marketing: The New Growth Framework for the AI Era

Traditional funnels are linear, while Loop Marketing is continuous.

HubSpot’s Loop Marketing framework gives brands a way to grow in the post-AI landscape.

This is how Kipp recommends companies to prepare themselves :

1️⃣ Express

Define your identity, ICP, tone, POV, and narrative.
Feed it into your AI tools to generate consistent content at scale.

2️⃣ Tailor

Personalize messages using AI and data so every interaction feels unique.

3️⃣ Amplify

Distribute content across the channels buyers actually use today:

• Short-form video
• Creators & influencers
• Reddit & communities
• YouTube
• And increasingly… AI engines

4️⃣ Evolve

Use AI’s real-time insights to adjust campaigns instantly — not months later.

This is the backbone of modern marketing.

5. HubSpot Is Building the Tools for the AI Era

HubSpot isn’t just describing the problem — it’s giving businesses the infrastructure to win.

Some of the most important features include:

• Brand Style Guides with AI integration
• AI-powered personalization across email, pages, and CTAs
• Customer Agents for real-time conversion support
• AEO Strategy Tool for optimizing content for AI responses (coming soon)
• Breeze AI for insights, personalization, and optimization
• Data Studio for unified data models
• AI campaign simulation and real-time performance alerts

These tools enable any business — from SMBs to global brands — to adopt Loop Marketing without reinventing their entire strategy overnight.

What This Means for Your Business

If your business still relies heavily on:

• PPC
• Traditional SEO
• Organic social
• Long-form blogs alone

…you’re leaving opportunities (and revenue) on the table.

The brands that will dominate the next decade are those that:

✔ Adapt quickly
✔ Prioritize AEO
✔ Rebuild their playbook for AI
✔ Personalize deeply
✔ Move from campaigns → to experiments → to loops

HubSpot already proved what’s possible.
Your company can follow the same path.

Ready to adapt your marketing to the AI era?

At Andimol, we help companies adopt Loop Marketing, modernize their HubSpot setup, and build AEO-ready content strategies that match today’s customer behavior.

If you want to explore how to prepare your brand for this shift, let’s talk.