Why Website Traffic Is Almost Dead Today

Using only 20% of your business data is like dating someone who only texts emojis. First of all, that's annoying. And second, you're missing a lot of context. But that's how most businesses operate today, using only 20% of their data. Unless you have HubSpot, where all the emails, call logs and chat messages turn into insights to grow your business. Because all that data makes all the difference. I would know because I use HubSpot at my company. Learn more@HubSpot.com so Neil, let me show you this, this table over here. You actually, you hit on one of the topics I have here. So check this out. So this guy over here, Danny, Danny Crichton, post this. So he says no discussion of tech media can get past this basic traffic fact. In the AI world, Google and social no longer refers traffic, which means that the vast majority of readers just never find you in the first place. Here's the analysis over here, right? So you see digital Trends, peak traffic 8.5 million in 2024, March 2024, January 2026 264,097 decline. Right? Remember ZDNet, 7.6 million visits per month. February 2024, 768,000 minus 90%. Right? So like Wired.com 7.7 million. November 2024 drops to 2.9 million, negative 62%. Dude. So I think, by the way, like what Neil said, he's not wrong, right? But I think it's just really interesting to look at these big publications from the past, how they, some of them have adapted, but I don't think a lot of them have adapted.

0:00

The bigger problem with publications is they're creating informational content. Informational content is the stuff that's getting hit the hardest. The content that's more transactional, navigational. That's the stuff where you can still get a ton of traffic and more importantly, revenue. Because if someone wants to talk about, let's say with cnet, they talk about computer related stuff or how to geek. I've never been to how to Geek, but I'm assuming it's computer related stuff. If you go to CNET and you're reading an article on how to optimize the memory in your computer and make it more efficient so your PC is more quicker. Because memory is a big issue in AI, right? Not a lot of people are talking about that, but this is why companies like Dell are booming. Um, and with that article, Google in AI overviews or AI mode or Gemini or ChatGPT or perplexity or Claude, they're just pulling in what to look for and how to fix it so that way you don't have to go to cnet. Reading that article on CNET produces them revenue, but it produces them revenue, typically on the ad front. On the flip side, transactional keywords, navigational keywords, these are more bottom of funnel. They drive revenue. People still go to websites for it, even if they don't go to your website. And an AI agent just helps you finish the transaction on their website. That works too. At least you're capturing revenue. Who cares if you get the visitor? You just want the revenue. That's really the end game. And if you're like, no, I want the visitor, you're looking at the wrong metrics in your marketing and you have been for years. Yes, I get how more visitors in theory relate to more revenue. But even three years ago, five years ago, before all this stuff, your number one metric that you should have been looking at is revenue. Ltv profitability, even more than traffic or followers or likes. But it's the type of content that people are creating and the informational ones are getting hit the hardest. And a lot of businesses haven't adapted from just shifting away to we're just going to cover everything related to marketing, like what is SEO? Well, that's cool and all, but there's already a million articles now. Even if you don't get traffic, you do want to make sure you're covering your topic thoroughly on your website because you still want AI and Google to pull from you, even if you don't get the traffic, because you're building up the authority and the brand visibility and they're more likely to cite you. But you just don't want to target all informational keywords like what is marketing? Well, that's been beaten to death and a million sites hypothetically have covered that.

1:30

I think a lot of this just comes down to adaptability at the end of the day. So we've talked about search everywhere optimization to death over these last few years. And so a lot of these, like digital trends, for example, they just didn't adapt their business models and they were, they were not quick enough. Right. Versus the ones who have. Let's use Andreessen Horowitz as an example. Right. I was actually listening to a podcast where Ben, Ben Horowitz and Mark Andreessen and we're talking about the new media model that they have where they get to control the narrative and they have multiple podcasts going on. They have like multiple YouTube channels. They've really kind of mastered the media game not just for themselves, but also for their portfolio companies as well. But that's a good example of a company adapting. Because, you know, the reason, part of the reason why they did it was because they were getting attacked all the time by like the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. But now the Internet, they realize that the Internet has changed and you want to be able to own the conversation. And that's what they have done. Right? And so, um, I think that that's, that's the name of the game here. Like, don't get me wrong, like, Neil and I first started in SEO, and when we look at this, it's like, yeah, it sucks. And like our traffic has declined. I don't know if we declined 97%. We definitely haven't. But we've also adapted to kind of appear on other channels. You want to know something interesting, Neil? So yesterday I was talking to Apple and I was like, okay, we're ready to pull the trigger on some of these Mac Ultras, right? I was like, but we need the 512, 512 gigabyte unified RAM. And they're like, we don't have those anymore. I'm like, why don't you have them? He's like, because we're sold out. I'm like, oh, damn it. So it's like you do need, if you're going to run local models, you do need the 512. At minimum. You can't have 256 because like a model, like a Kimi 2.5, which is an open source model, runs on like 240 or something like that. So you don't have much wiggle room there. So I'm like, okay, well, you know, my strategy now is like, okay, if I'm going to buy these Mac Ultras, I was going to buy like one old one because it's a Mac, it's on the M3 Ultra chip. But the M5 is about to come out. I thought it was going to come out this week. It didn't come out this week. It's going to come out in like two months or so. So my point of saying all this is that I think a lot of people are buying, you know, on prem at least for themselves around local models. Because, Neil, I spent five grand just on my own anthropic API key in the last 30 days or so, and that stuff's going to keep adding up. I'm like, God damn it if. Sorry, part of my language. Damn it. Okay, if I released my open claw to My team, and they're all using it like crazy and they're going to town. I need to have local models if I want to save the monies.

4:00

So yeah, dude, yeah, RAM is super important and people forget that. They all think like, you know, these GPUs or CPUs, I forgot whatever they call, I think they're called GPUs, you know, like the Nvidia chips, AMD chips and all that kind of stuff, the TPUs. But they forget that you also need tons and tons of ram and without that it doesn't work.

6:22

You know the research I did on this yesterday, I. What, what was I using? Was I using Claude? Was I using OpenAI? I was using none of this. I was using Gemini AI mode for this. Okay. And I was like, okay, so give me a crawl walk run for this. Like, what do I need to do? So my crawl walk run, just if anyone's interested for my local on prem setup is I'm going to have multiple Mac studios, okay. And each one of Those is like 10 to 15 grand, by the way. So you have a few of those. Okay. One might be running the local models or the open source models locally, but you might have some for clients. You might have some for like your team's agents and all that. But the other thing too is you actually will need an Nvidia like one of those Cuda chips as well. Because if you want one of those, that's going to decrease the time it takes to get these tokens out, right? So if your team starts complaining about, hey, it's taking too long to get answers, well, that's when you start to need to include like one of these like 10 to 15 to $20,000 Nvidia CUDA chips. So, yeah, my guess, Neil, is you're gonna probably be buying from Nvidia soon as well. So we'll see.

6:45

We could be. I have no idea what the heck my team buys. Half the time I just see credit card bills and I stopped looking at them because I used to go line item by line item. It's just so much stuff to go through. Line item by line item now catches

7:45

the line items for our podcast cost sooner than I do.

7:58

I have a tendency to nitpick every expense. And I was like, what is this?

8:03

It shouldn't be this. It shouldn't be this. I'm just. At the same time, I'm like, I don't know. But the good news is HubSpot, which is our sponsor, those checks should start to come in soon at some Point. So we will see. Yeah. By the way, Neil, did you see how Intercom, they talked about reinventing themselves into doing 400 million in ARR?

8:08

I did not see that. I'm really curious about this. Do you want to catch.

8:29

Okay, yeah, I'll share my screen then I'll get your reaction first to this. But okay, so I don't know how you pronounce the name. I don't know if it's like Owen. So he's the CEO of Intercom. Okay. So originally Intercom was like a help desk software, like a Zendesk or like a little chatbot you have in the bottom right of your screen. Neil, did I miss anything there?

8:33

That basically was the original version of Intercom. Think of a chat that pops up in your bottom right corner. And that chat was human powered. Right. And it was mainly humans using it. Although I think you could have some pre filled text and you could input a database.

8:57

But those were never that great.

9:12

It was never that great.

9:13

Yeah. Okay, so Intercom, I think they were maybe at some point in the last couple years or so, they're maybe doing a hundred million in ARR now today they're doing 400 million. Okay. So so the CEO and founder, he left for actually two to three years or so. Okay. And then it was only when ChatGPT came out where that was the existential kind of code red moment for them and they started building. Fin is actually their customer service agent that I actually interacted with one yesterday where it actually answers and solves questions. It's basically your automated customer service team. Did I miss anything there?

9:14

No. And it's really good. And to be clear, when Intercom made this pivot, instead of saying hey intercom.com you can get all this stuff, I believe it was like spin AI or they, they create a separate brand, separate product. So that way there wasn't confusion to get more adoption in the market.

9:46

Yep. So I'll kind of give you the TLDR on this post. I highly recommend you read it because It's. It's got 870,000 views on, on Twitter. But so Owen says, look, you know, I'm going to offer Intercom, the company I run as a case study to help me explain how SaaS companies can be saved and share the things we did starting three years ago to find relevance in this new world. We found ourselves being referred to as the poster boys for success as a late stage SaaS company in AI. And I'd like to first share some numbers and background context to help you understand why that is so, three years ago, our future was looking pretty bleak. I jumped back into the CEO role after a two year hiatus while sick. While we were heading quickly towards negative growth, all SaaS growth rates fell as the ZIRP days waned. Zero interest rate policy and ours fell extra hard due to unfocused business strategy that led to poor product market fit. A month later, ChatGPT was announced and we all begin our collective gradual and still ongoing journey. To try to understand what that all means, I'll give you a simplified meme version of the story. First. Step one, A.I. step two, a lot of question marks. Step three, profit. Because I'll be explaining the how shortly after. But in summary, we launched our new service fin in the summer of 2023. So now it's, we're talking two and a half years or so. And our business began to violently, violently re recover thereafter. Like by the way, look at this chart. So Neil, I'll let you kind of explain this chart.

10:04

It's too small for me to see.

11:20

Oh, you can't see. Okay, so basically what you have here is you can see in 2021, okay, 2020 happens, right? So everything starts moving up. SAS intercom growth rate is like a high of 37%. Okay. But 2021, okay, it drops to 30, 31% growth rate, then 30%, then 24%, then 18%, then 12%. At 12% when it's like it's coming down a cliff right now, that's when the CEO change happens and he comes back in. Okay, so CEO like by the way, CEO change happens, it drops from Intercom growth rate drops from 12%, 7%, 5%, 4%. When it's at 4% at their lowest, that's when they launch fin. And right when that launch happens, 4%, 6%, 7%, 9%, all the way back up. My camera's blocking the way, but it goes up to like 30, 37%. 37% all the way back up to 37% and they're crushing the average. Like you see the black line over here? That's the average SaaS growth rate. They are now well above that. And that's the recovery story, right? So they're now at 400 million ARR overall with Fin about to pass 100 million. Go ahead.

11:21

Yeah, but when Eric's showing 37% growth, their growth rate is higher. With a higher base to grow at 37%. When you're doing $400 million, that means you're adding $148 million in revenue that's recurring each and every single year. But here's the kicker, right? So if they're at 400 right now and they grow 37% next year, they're at 548. Hypothetically, assuming the growth rate stays flat, but their growth rate is actually increasing. So let's say if they just maintain 37% growth, it's 548 because they added 148 million. And then when you look at the 548, 37% growth on that is 202. So it keeps compounding. So then there'll be over $700 million. And I bet you at that point they'll go public.

12:25

Cool. So let's talk about how they did it. Right. So then the main gist of his article here, without reading the entire thing, is this. At Intercom, we destroyed so many things, big and small. We ripped up our old values and created new disruptive ones which we then hired and fired against to drive the behavior we needed in this new world. We, we rewrote our mission to focus on our agent goals and we change our targets to Fin revenue. We switched up our board, removing mature and experienced leaders for startup founders. We moved our R and D focus to be nearly 80% on FIN while that business was still a single digit percent of our revenue. We created a whole new brand and a separate site with a separate $1 million AI domain. Ouch. And drove 100% of our paid traffic to it. Every bit of marketing said Finfin Fin, not Intercom. And it was risky, big picture brand and positioning marketing to hopefully pay off later versus incremental performance marketing to definitely pay off that quarter. So again, while Fin was a single digit percent of our revenue, all because we needed a market to give us a new look for a new category. We aggressively promoted and compensated our AI team above others. We grew from 6 people to 60 people in 3 years with real PhD level AI scientists and researchers. We built out our own AI and trained our foundational models. More on that soon. So the main thing he's calling out here is this. We did not hold back on the creative destruction. And that really is the only idea I'm trying to sell here. We deserted our past to make way for our future. So you could, what I just mentioned earlier, he's like, you know, we, we got rid of our entire board. Screw experience. We bet all in on the single digit thing. That wasn't even that the main thing. And they, they just ripped everything apart and they were willing to destroy Everything for the future. And I think not many people are willing to do that. And so he's saying, look, this shit is insanely hard. The shift from on prem to cloud wrecked many companies. But the change was not nearly as fast. And while it proved quite difficult.

13:19

Right.

15:04

I think this shift is he's like, look, it's hard to do this shift, but little old left 4 dead, 15 year old intercom did it. You can do it too. You have the brand, the customer base, the cash flows and the access to debt. So what do you think, dude?

15:05

I think spot on. The big thing here that I think a lot of people need to take away at least from marketing and business lesson is sometimes people try to adapt their old products or create old products, but there's brands and people perceive a brand for a specific thing. It's really hard to reinvent a brand and say, hey, we used to do this, but now we're this. Sometimes people just have it pigeonholed on what you do. So sometimes the best approach to move forward is to not try to convince everyone your brands change. It's to launch a new brand that's owned by the main parent company that focuses on this new thing and you get easier adoption in many cases and you start seeing a quicker uptick. That's at least what we've noticed. Because it's hard to please the old customers and the new customers at the same time. So in many cases it's easier to launch a new brand.

15:17

So you know what I want to call out here is I'll call out this last line that he has here. So it says, look, I want you to survive it and win. So this, this change, this AI change, right? All it will take is destroying everything you love. So here's what's happening right now, at least for me, the experience. Shares from my side, like supplement companies are growing very quickly. Crypto companies are growing very quickly. They're coming and they're seeing the content that I'm putting out and they're saying, hey, we want to do what you do. And then internally, the struggle that we're having right now is that you can't just be button pushers for paid media. You can't just say, I'm going to do keyword research and do traditional SEO. It doesn't work anymore. Right? So what we're doing from a creative destruction standpoint is my CTO leveraging OpenClaw last week. We are actually building something that's actually promoting a fin like product. Right. For another company. But we're Building all the scaffolding for the cold outbound. The voice. The voice phone calls. Right. With voice. Voicemails as well, from the AI. And also we're building the agents to kind of fulfill everything from end to end right now. Everything from, like, the software stuff, we're just like, let's just give that all away, or at least do freemium for all that, and then have those be lead magnets that lead up to kind of the main things over here. And then the dashboard that you saw earlier, that's all gonna plug in together. Right. So that's how we see all this doing. But without this coming together, but without an open claw and a cloud code, we wouldn't be able to do this as quickly. And so I think it's easier for us because we're smaller, to be able to kind of move quickly like this. But I think if you're a larger company, like Intercom, for example, if you. It's more difficult. And he had to make that bet to just say, you know, eff it all in. And it paid off for him, at least so far. Yeah.

16:09

And when you said that internally, you guys are working on creative destruction, maybe I heard that incorrectly. I think I heard. What do you mean by that?

17:51

So actually, he used this term over here, where we did not hold back on the creative destruction. So this actually came from the. The Cole brothers. Right. So I think it's the Cole brothers.

18:00

Here's the Cole brothers. Is that the stripe? No, that's not Strike.

18:08

No, that's the Collison brothers. You know, the. Oh, Coke, Coke, Coke. Koch brothers. K, K, O, C, H. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So, you know, they're. They're a conglomerate. Just for those that don't know, they have a bunch of privately held companies, I think maybe the largestly largest privately held conglomerate, maybe.

18:11

No, no, Cargill's larger.160 billion in revenue a year.

18:28

So anyway. But they're pretty big, right?

18:33

My brothers passed away. Although his wife just bought. I think it was last year, she bought part of the New York Giants. She bought, I think, 10% of the Brooklyn Nets. She's been making some moves.

18:35

I love how you're on top of it. Anyway, so the Koch brothers. I read one of their books. They do talk a lot about creative destruction. You have to be willing to destroy what you currently have for what's new. And that's what Intercom did. The way I see it is that whether we like it, at least for us, whether we like it or not, a lot of our original Services in its current form is being destroyed. Right? So we have to evolve and into the new world. And, you know, it's hard for people to adapt. But I'll tell you, the ones that are. It's like every week, I'm almost. I stole this question from one of our mutual friends, like, hey, Neil, what have you automated this week? What have you automated this week? It's like, okay, the ad production now is going from like, you know, maybe 2 to 400, because people are now asking about more AI creatives, right? And they want like 4 to 5,000amonth or so or 10,000amonth or so. And, you know, the team has gradually been building up to that, Right? So that's an example of, hey, you can't do creative, like, necessarily the old way. You still need a lot of the process, but you need to learn this new way. But major creative destruction is with some of the products that we're building. That's major creative destruction. Because the way we see the future is like, we need to hire probably a lot of strong marketing strategists too. So that doesn't go anywhere. Cause that's what we do. That's what you guys do too. But we need to hire a lot of AI automation engineers to leverage the openclaws and the cloud codes and then partner up with the marketing strategist. And then you also need to have a leadership layer. So at least for me, that's very, very different than what I was doing, you know, even two years ago.

18:45

Yeah, dude. It's just so funny how I'm now starting to see big corporations finally encourage AI, at least in marketing. And when I mean encourage it. There's been a shift, if I had to say, last year, even towards the end of last year, not. Which isn't that much time ago, right? You're talking about, like six months ago. I was seeing a shift in organizations of all sizes. Hey, you should get way more done with AI. Why don't. Why aren't you able to fire a lot of people? Why do you need all these people? Can't AI just do a ton of this stuff for you? That was a narrative, call it in Q4 of 2025 that I was seeing

20:08

from a lot of companies.

20:57

And that was the internal pressure they were getting from their CFOs, CEOs, et cetera. Now internally, I'm actually seeing organizations say something very different. They're not pushing the narrative. Why do you need all these people? Shouldn't you get more done with AI? I see the narrative of, hey, everyone's moving so fast because of AI. What resources do you need to make sure that we don't get left behind and we can stay ahead of our competitors? Who do you need to hire? What training do we need? I'm not really hearing too much of the narrative of firing. I hear more of the narrative is there's so much going on, and the executives understand this. There's so many LLMs, so much technology, so many platforms, it's hard to keep up. They're just like, how do we stay ahead? Who do we need to hire? Because many of these large organizations have so much cash on their balance sheets, right? They're not focused right now as much on cost cutting their focus. And I think this is actually more important. How do we stay ahead and make sure we don't lose? And if that means you're paying extra in the short run or spending more, I think that is an investment that's worth it. But the key right now, if you want to win in this AI race, is not about cutting costs. It's about how can you make sure you're adapting to this technology and implementing and integrating it and using it correctly faster than the competition.

20:58

All right, guys, well, I hope you enjoyed this. I need to go run to a webinar. Neil's gonna go to bed. So I hope you all enjoyed it, and we'll catch you next time.

22:24