How durable and central is content and SEO as a demand generation engine?

Harry Stebbings · Sep 28, 2022

Content is a game of who can survive the longest, and most people fail because they cannot endure long enough

His own podcast took seven to eight years of grinding every weekend to reach hundreds of thousands of listeners, and even then it sometimes doesn't work

8:09 20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop

Harry Stebbings · Jan 18, 2023

The number one reason people fail with content as a channel is that they give up too early.

Content takes time, so it requires patience.

11:26 20Growth: When To Make Your First Growth Hire? How To Structure the Hiring Process for Growth? Five Core Things the Best Growth Hires Do in the First Week? What to Expect New Growth Hires to Achieve in the First 30 and 90 Days with Hila Qu, Growth Advisor

Harry Stebbings · Aug 16, 2023

Content as a growth channel is fundamentally about consistency and persistence — a game of who can survive the longest

7:01 20Growth: Why Product-Market Fit is Not Enough, Revenue Does Not Create Usage, Metrics Must Be Before Strategy, Why it is Always Better to Concentrate than Diversify Marketing Channels and Secrets from Hubspot's Growth Engine with Brian Balfour @ Reforge

Guillaume Moubeche · Dec 13, 2024

Content is a flywheel that returns almost nothing in the first year and only compounds later, so early revenue has to come from founder-led outbound.

In year one he closed roughly 100 customers himself from ~300 demos while content produced almost no customers; only afterwards did content pick up and inbound come to dominate at 70% of revenue.

Scope: based on lemlist's own trajectory

10:20 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire

Harry Stebbings · Apr 4, 2025

Content marketing often takes about two years before any ROI appears, so patience is the decisive variable

Returns on content only compound after a long lag

Scope: 'often' — not universal

12:42 20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox

Kyle Norton · May 30, 2025

Spending heavily on organic content long before it makes economic sense is worth it because the payoff compounds

Long payoff horizon but compounding: they now have more social followers than public company rivals, prospects arrive saying they watched twelve hours of the founder's YouTube, and the content is reused in onboarding and customer marketing

Scope: long time horizon before payoff; still early innings

33:26 20Sales: From $2M ARR to $40M ARR: The Playbook | How to Use AI To Supercharge Your Sales Team | Why Pipeline Reviews are BS | The Sales Call Script that Closes 99% of Prospects and How to Hire the Best Sales Reps with Kyle Norton, CRO @ Owner

Harry Stebbings · Apr 4, 2025

SEM and SEO will shift significantly over the next few years due to the rise and dominance of ChatGPT, with AI chat already growing as an inbound source (e.g. Vercel reportedly moving from ~1% to ~4%)

Guillermo Rauch has said ChatGPT moved from 1% to 4% of Vercel's inbound

10:39 20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox

Kieran Flanagan · Jul 11, 2025

AI overviews will become Google's default way of answering queries, which is what is destroying referral traffic to publishers

AI overviews already appear on over 35% of searches and Google announced at its last conference it intends to make AI mode the default search experience, already being tested in the US and India

24:41 20Growth: The Death of Growth Teams? | How Hubspot Use AI to Triple Email Conversion | The Future of AI SEO | Why Prompt Engineering is the New Coding | What Every CMO Needs to Know About AI in 2025

Kieran Flanagan · Jul 11, 2025

Google search is the growth channel that is dying over the next two to three years

In B2B 80% of purchases used to start on Google search, and it is predicted that by 2027 95% will start in an LLM — a drastically different world

Scope: says it reluctantly, as it was one of the best channels they had

64:07 20Growth: The Death of Growth Teams? | How Hubspot Use AI to Triple Email Conversion | The Future of AI SEO | Why Prompt Engineering is the New Coding | What Every CMO Needs to Know About AI in 2025

Alex Schultz · Sep 5, 2025

People who use AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Meta AI and Gemini change their search behavior dramatically

The future is here but unevenly distributed — the shift is visible in the subset already using these tools

28:08 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader

Jeetu Mahtani · Sep 27, 2024

Content and SEO are still something founders have to do, but distribution has become much harder and more layered than 10–15 years ago

The old formula was just blogs and conversion paths; now you also have to think about social, LinkedIn presence, and founders and execs creating content

Scope: philosophy unchanged; execution and distribution more complex

20:36 20Sales: Scaling Hubspot from $3M to $1BN in ARR | How to Hire and Ramp Sales Teams | How to Scale Customer Success Successfully | How and When to Go International and Crush It with Jeetu Mahtani

Yamini Rangan · Mar 18, 2025

The right response to declining search traffic is diversifying the content and distribution mix into podcasts and email newsletters, which HubSpot began three to four years ago before AI arrived.

Owned channels like a podcast network with millions of listeners and email newsletters with daily coverage provide distribution that doesn't depend on search clicks.

42:09 20VC: HubSpot CEO on Where Value Accrues in SaaS AI | How HubSpot Competes Against Salesforce | Why B2B Is Not a Winner Take All Market | How to Go From SMB to Enterprise an Win | How SEO Dying Changes HubSpot's Business with Yamini Rangan

Yamini Rangan · Mar 18, 2025

Marketing should meet customers where they already are (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn) rather than expecting them to come to your own digital properties as SEO allowed

Customers no longer just visit your website, so a distributed presence is a more customer-centric marketing strategy

43:40 20VC: HubSpot CEO on Where Value Accrues in SaaS AI | How HubSpot Competes Against Salesforce | Why B2B Is Not a Winner Take All Market | How to Go From SMB to Enterprise an Win | How SEO Dying Changes HubSpot's Business with Yamini Rangan

Yamini Rangan · Mar 18, 2025

Search is shifting from serving blue links you click through to serving answers you don't need to click, and that shift will continue for a while.

AI overviews and sources like Perplexity now answer the query directly, so SEO traffic has already been declining for a few years.

41:38 20VC: HubSpot CEO on Where Value Accrues in SaaS AI | How HubSpot Competes Against Salesforce | Why B2B Is Not a Winner Take All Market | How to Go From SMB to Enterprise an Win | How SEO Dying Changes HubSpot's Business with Yamini Rangan

Kieran Flanagan · Jul 11, 2025

We are heading to a world where users get all the answers they need without ever clicking through to a website, which removes the incentive to publish content at all

ChatGPT's trajectory shows answers are delivered in-product; if publishers get no visits back there is no reason to publish

Scope: what actually happens to the internet as a result is genuinely unclear to him

27:07 20Growth: The Death of Growth Teams? | How Hubspot Use AI to Triple Email Conversion | The Future of AI SEO | Why Prompt Engineering is the New Coding | What Every CMO Needs to Know About AI in 2025

Kieran Flanagan · Jul 11, 2025

AI search optimization requires hundreds of micro-versions of a product page tailored to different audiences, rather than ranking one page for a few keywords

Google taught people to search in keywords so a page had roughly three query variants, but people converse with AI assistants and can ask about a product in hundreds of ways

29:48 20Growth: The Death of Growth Teams? | How Hubspot Use AI to Triple Email Conversion | The Future of AI SEO | Why Prompt Engineering is the New Coding | What Every CMO Needs to Know About AI in 2025

Kieran Flanagan · Jul 11, 2025 · hedged

Content will shift from one segment-level product page to a hundred pages tailored to individual audiences, and possibly eventually a product page per company

Scope: 'who knows' about the page-per-company end state

40:55 20Growth: The Death of Growth Teams? | How Hubspot Use AI to Triple Email Conversion | The Future of AI SEO | Why Prompt Engineering is the New Coding | What Every CMO Needs to Know About AI in 2025

Kieran Flanagan · Jul 11, 2025

Share of voice, not referral traffic, is the more important metric for LLM optimization, and appearing in LLM answers is valuable even with almost no click-through

You can only measure referral traffic, and being cited gives you the biggest platform to show your brand — it functions like an ad impression

Scope: HubSpot's LLM referral traffic is still under 1% despite a 5x increase

38:16 20Growth: The Death of Growth Teams? | How Hubspot Use AI to Triple Email Conversion | The Future of AI SEO | Why Prompt Engineering is the New Coding | What Every CMO Needs to Know About AI in 2025

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

Traditional PR (TechCrunch, Product Hunt) still matters, but primarily as a source of citations for answer engines rather than as a traffic driver

AEO traffic increases when more external credible sources write positively about you; the value is un-owned narrative and credibility, not a traffic wave

Scope: framed as launch-stage 'table stakes' / founder initiation

47:06 20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski

Eran Zinman · Mar 2, 2026

Google's AI mode in search results cost Monday roughly 10% of new ARR acquisition, but the damage is isolated to that one channel

People now read AI answers instead of clicking sponsored links, so transactional high-intent SMB deals were lost, but the other ~70 acquisition channels showed no impact and the budget was shifted to them

Scope: the replacement channels have longer sales cycles; loss concentrated in transactional, SMB-oriented deals

38:16 20VC: Monday.com CEO on Is SaaS Dead: Will Everything Be Vibe Coded | Will Systems of Record Become Valueless Databases in an Agentic World | Will LLMs Own the Value in the Application Layer with Eran Zinman

Andrew Dudum · Apr 4, 2026

The rise of AI chat assistants has not dramatically changed how patients find Hims & Hers, because most first-time patients arrive via broad brand channels — Fox News, Thursday night NFL, word of mouth — rather than search ads

Hims is creating demand in new care categories rather than capturing existing search intent, so its funnel doesn't depend on AdWords

Scope: specific to first-time patients in new care categories

25:53 20VC: Hims & Hers: $4.3BN Market Cap on $2.3BN of Revenue: The Comeback | Why Being Public is 10x Better | The Death of the "Strategy" Hire | Why Performance Marketing is Worse than Brand Marketing with Andrew Dudum

Omer Shai · Jan 31, 2026

Most relevant search traffic in the world is still on Google, so marketers must optimize for both traditional search and AI search simultaneously

Only early adopters have moved off traditional search; the mass of regular users still search the old way

Scope: Google recently changed how AI is used in search; applies to both Wix's own marketing and what Wix teaches its users

31:11 20Growth: How Wix Built a $100M Marketing Machine | Why LTV is BS and Why Time Return On Investment is the Most Important Metric | How to 10x Your Growth: What is the Next Great Channel with Omer Shai, CMO @ Wix

Josh Browder · May 18, 2026

SEO decline is not an urgent threat to their business because GEO is rising in parallel and their non-SF customer base adopts new behaviours slowly

The world doesn't move at the pace of San Francisco; their customers are in middle America and the UK, and Google is still huge

Scope: they are hedging with GEO strategy anyway

58:21 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder

Kieran Flanagan · Jul 11, 2025

The informational content layer is collapsing into an action layer: AI trains on how-to content and users increasingly ask AI to do the task rather than teach them, so being cited for informational queries has little business impact

Humans used to go to Google to learn and then act; AI absorbs the informational content and executes, so people will learn to just ask the AI to do it for them

39:00 Informational content collapses into action layer so citation has little business value

Kieran Flanagan · Jul 11, 2025 · hedged

LLM referral traffic will only reach roughly 3-5% of referral traffic in two years; the real value of AI search is impressions and brand metrics, measured by correlation rather than causation

the volume of clicks stays small, so the payoff shows up in influence and brand measurement, which marketers may not like

52:35 Llm referral clicks stay small value shows up in brand and impression metrics

Jeetu Mahtani · Sep 27, 2024

HubSpot's inbound content engine is one of its durable moats and was the primary reason sales scaled efficiently

Content generated a predictable flood of leads, so hiring could simply be instrumented against demand growth; the blog still gets millions of monthly visitors

18:41 Inbound content engine is a durable moat

Josh Browder · May 18, 2026

Organic, media-driven customer acquisition is extremely efficient and profitable but imposes a growth ceiling you can't buy your way past

90%+ of DoNotPay customers come from SEO, viral stories and referrals, letting 11 people serve hundreds of thousands of customers — but they can't dump a million into Meta ads to grow on demand

57:02 Organic is hyper efficient but caps growth rate

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

Blog posts still matter for launches, both to give technical audiences benchmarks and implementation detail, and as the SEO landing asset that accumulates backlinks

Technical audiences need the details and the secret sauce, and SEO is not dead so each launch needs a key page to push links to

28:53 Blog posts remain valuable for technical detail and seo backlinks

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

SEO tool pages — small interactive product surfaces built for a specific query — will keep working for at least five years

They require real engineering work and often proprietary data, so it will be a long time before LLMs spin up whole dynamic pages, and by then they'd be replacing your product anyway

29:40 Seo tool pages survive because they require engineering and proprietary data llms cant replicate soon

Harry Stebbings · May 31, 2024

Content is a poor channel choice for most startups because you must produce hundreds of pieces before anyone cares and you still get no proof it works

Many channels take a long time and give no data along the way, so you have to suspend disbelief that it could work

24:48 Content requires hundreds of unproven pieces making it a poor channel choice for most startups

Omer Shai · Jan 31, 2026

Investment in SEO should go up, not down, in a world of AI

AI surfaces are influenced by activities similar to SEO, so there is more to do than before — it just requires being smarter and having the right headcount and thinking

30:12 Ai era requires more seo investment not less

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

AEO has revived old-school SEO tactics like mass page production, but pumping out AI-generated slop pages at scale is the wrong move — the content has to actually be valuable because crawlers ingest it

Competitor sitemap analysis shows companies shipping 100-200 pages a week that are mostly AI slop; what gets written about you determines your citations in answer engines

45:19 Aeo rewards valuable pages not mass ai slop