Meanwhile, on Content-Marketing LinkedIn
The real traffic decline was the existential crisis we had along the way.
Back in January, a LinkedIn post made a splash within a particular corner of the internet: content marketers. I was riveted at the time—so much so that I wrote this entire essay, then promptly put it in a digital drawer and forgot about it.
This piece isn’t a recap of that incident so much as an excavation of what it exposed: the insecurities, incentives, and identity questions baked into modern content work. Yes, it’s about SEO—but only on the surface. Underneath, it’s about attention, credibility, and what it means to build trust in a professional landscape where everything is content.
So yes, I’m reheating LinkedIn tea from January. But if HubSpot can do it, so can I. Hopefully, what’s interesting here isn’t the specifics of the post, but what the reaction revealed about the world we’re all working inside, whether we realize it or not.
Meanwhile, on Content-Marketing LinkedIn
On January 23, 2025, a single LinkedIn post set off a series of debates that would expose the fault lines running through contemporary content marketing.
The post featured a graph showing HubSpot’s declining search traffic, paired with the caption: “Welcome to a new era of SEO.” The poster? Ryan Law, VP of Content Marketing at Ahrefs, the marketing intelligence platform where content marketers like myself have spent collective eons monitoring search rankings and creeping on each others’ traffic.
What followed was a flurry of commentary, riffs, and think-pieces. LinkedIn posts begat comment threads which turned into more LinkedIn posts which became blog posts. The internet did what the internet does best.
Three months later, HubSpot finally joined the discourse, publishing its own traffic-postmortem and arguing the sky is not falling. They’ve just been rerouting their content firepower from high-volume how-to posts to a multi-channel, influence-over-information playbook. The SEO chart dipped, but (according to HubSpot) the brand’s gravitational pull kept compounding.
Beneath the surface-level skirmishes of the original dustup lies something more revealing: a set of deeper, older questions about what content marketing is, what it’s for, and what happens when it starts to blur into editorial, performance art, or public spectacle.
Because this wasn’t just about HubSpot’s traffic numbers. It was about the stories we tell ourselves—about value, about relevance, about what it means to matter.
So let’s walk through the drama. Not to rehash the beef, but to see what it’s really pointing to.
The content marketing panic cycle
When this debate first hit my feed, my eyes rolled back in my head a little. I’ve seen this movie before—several times, in fact, going all the way back to my first introduction to SEO in 2015. And somehow, it’s always about HubSpot.
HubSpot has been a bright star in the content marketing sky for years now—an emblem of a certain kind of SEO success. But this latest wave of conversation wasn’t just about traffic trends. It was about the way our field processes uncertainty.
The players and platforms change, but the narrative remains consistent: something is dying, something else is rising, and we all need to pivot right now.
That’s what struck me most. Not the traffic graph or the comment threads, but the familiar emotional undertow. The anxiety. The existential twinge:
Will my skills still matter?
Will my strategy still work?
Am I becoming irrelevant?
Every decade brings new tools and trends that seem to rewrite the rules. But the fundamentals—connecting with audiences, translating value, telling the right story to the right person—haven’t changed.
The attention economy is alive and well
One thing I admire about Ryan Law: he understands the mechanics of attention.
The viral spread of his post was a masterclass in modern attention economics. Take a recognized industry leader (HubSpot), pair it with a sharp visual suggesting decline, frame it as a harbinger of systemic change, and boom: virality. Whether people agreed, disagreed, or just wanted to subtweet, the conversation was happening. About Ahrefs. Around Ahrefs. And crucially, on Ahrefs.
Success in content marketing has never been just about being right or useful or smart (though those help). It’s about getting attention—and then using that attention to move people. Toward a product. A belief. A behavior. A brand.
SEO has always been a channel, not the game. There was content marketing before the internet (did you know John Deere had a magazine in 1941?) and there will be content marketing long after the internet becomes something else entirely.
The game is—and always has been—attention.
How do you earn it? How do you keep it? And how do you use it, not just to get clicks, but to steer people toward something meaningful?
That’s the real strategy. The Green brothers (John and Hank, of Vlogbrothers) know it. They’ve channeled their YouTube community into pharmaceutical pricing activism. LEGO Masters knows it—they’ve sold millions of dollars in tiny plastic bricks using story and spectacle. None of that happened in a CMS. Only some of it was search-optimized.
In the attention economy, attention is capital. And the smartest content marketers treat it like a precious, spendable resource—not an end, but a means.
Attention shifts, outcomes stay put
HubSpot’s pivot is the clearest proof yet that channels are table settings, not the meal. Five years ago their growth engine was “rank for every how-to under the sun.” Today it’s an influence flywheel that mixes Academy courses, The Hustle’s newsfeed, YouTube explainers, and exec-level podcasts.
What changed? Where the audience hangs out—and how Google and LLMs surface expertise. What didn’t change are the goals that sit under all that motion:
Be top-of-mind when the buying moment hits. Whether a reader arrives from a blue link, an AI overview, or a TikTok clip, the endgame is still “HubSpot feels inevitable.”
Turn borrowed attention into durable trust. The channel shift forces deeper proof of expertise (courses, community, long-form shows) but the KPI is the same—loyalty that survives algorithm churn.
Monetize credibility, not just clicks. Traffic spikes used to be the numerator; now credibility is the denominator. Fewer visits, higher intent keeps the revenue math working.
In other words: tactics mutate, but the strategic spine—earn attention, convert trust, capture demand—stays intact. HubSpot didn’t abandon the game; it just moved the pieces to the square where attention currently lives.
Everything is content
Joan Didion once said, “Everything is copy.” It’s a line that’s made its way from literary memoir into the DNA of digital culture—and content marketing by extension. Everything is copy. Everything is content.
It’s a mentality that shows up everywhere. Wistia makes Wistia videos to sell Wistia. Gimlet Media made a podcast about building Gimlet Media. Every (where I’m a contributing editor) began as a newsletter, then expanded into a product studio and software bundle—and now has a column about the studio and the software. Whether you call it “brand journalism” or “building in public,” the strategy is the same: use what’s happening inside the company to connect with people outside it.
It’s content as proof. Content as process. Content as performance. And Ryan Law gets that. Being both a marketer of Ahrefs and a user of Ahrefs puts him in a uniquely powerful position. It’s the kind of credibility loop that most marketers only dream about.
As generative AI lowers the barrier to entry for basic content creation, what rises in value is embodied insight—the kind of operational, experience-based perspective that can’t be easily faked or fine-tuned into existence. That’s what separates a screenshot from a story. It’s what makes some posts feel like thought leadership and others like thought residue.
The best content is rooted in use. It reflects real decisions, real stakes, real outcomes. And when done well, that kind of content earns trust.
So yes, everything is content. But not everything is equally compelling. What stands out—what lasts—is content born from real context, not just clever framing.
Content’s identity crisis continues
We live in a moment where everything is content. Commentary becomes currency. The edges between analysis and performance keep dissolving. A traffic graph turns into a professional crisis. A screenshot sparks a dozen essays. A single post ricochets into a new narrative about the entire industry.
The cycle has played out before. But each time it repeats, the stakes feel a little different. AI is speeding up the pace and muddying the waters. Everyone’s a publisher now. Everyone’s a brand. It’s easier than ever to create—and harder than ever to know what’s worth paying attention to.
This is the tension content marketers are working inside every day. We’re supposed to drive growth and build trust. Move fast and be thoughtful. Make things that are optimized and original. It’s a lot to hold at once. And sometimes, it shows.
The conversation that spun out from Ryan Law’s post wasn’t really about SEO. It was about credibility. It was about how we attribute ideas, how we stake claims, how we build reputations in a professional landscape that rarely slows down long enough to ask what any of it means.
What do we owe the people reading our work? What do we owe each other? What does ethical content marketing look like when the content itself is always on display?
These concerns shape how we show up. They shape what we make. The tools have changed, and the velocity has increased—but the pressure at the heart of this field remains the same. We want to be seen. We want to be useful. We want to be trusted. And sometimes we want all of those things at once, with no clear roadmap for how to get there.
This isn’t a crisis to fix. It’s a condition to understand. Content marketing has always been a field that sits between disciplines—half story, half strategy. That ambiguity isn’t going away. But maybe clarity isn’t the goal. Maybe the goal is to keep asking better questions.