Content marketing is dead. Long live the brand mention.

HubSpot marketing executive Kieran Flanagan published an essay in Fortune under the headline “We built inbound marketing. Now we’re burying it.” HubSpot’s blog, they wrote, had lost five million visits in a single thirty-day period.

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The best evidence against everything above comes from Graphite, an SEO agency, using Similarweb data on the 40,000 largest U.S. sites. It found organic search traffic down only 2.5% in 2025, and its CEO, Ethan Smith, discloses that his firm makes money when SEO is healthy. Take the number at face value. Then read the tables underneath it. Digital Trends lost 68% of its organic search traffic, Lifewire and Chegg lost 60% each, Study.com lost 54%, and Course Hero lost 49%. On the other side of the same table, Quince gained 132%, Temu 71%, and Anthropologie 66%. By category, news, health, cooking, and entertainment each fell more than 10%, while clothing, shopping, and marketplaces went up.

The traffic didn’t leave the web. It left the sites that explain things and went to the sites that sell things.

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