60% of searches end without a click. Here's the new playbook

Digital marketing is being upended, and businesses that want to stay ahead must respond with new tools and strategies.

That was the message at the HubSpot Inbound 2025 conference in San Francisco. Here's what I learned today.

Inbound is changing

Remember the digital marketing funnel? Awareness, consideration, conversion. The funnel made it easy to visualise the customer journey and create appropriate content to attract, engage, and delight customers.

Except that the playbook has played out, says HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan in her keynote: "Awareness has scattered. Buyers are on TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, podcasts, everywhere. Buyers used to start with your content on your website. Now, they are everywhere but your website."

"Consideration - the middle of the funnel, is broken. Now, AI overviews provide the answers at the top of every search... 60% of Google searches end up with zero clicks. That is why organic traffic is down."

It isn't that content is broken, says Yamini. But the link from search to the company blog is gone, and the shift is only going to accelerate. It's time for a new growth playbook for the AI era.

Loop Marketing for the AI era

The new approach is to get AI to work in a way that doesn't erode the authentic voice of a business. HubSpot calls it the Loop playbook: Express who you are, Tailor to your customer, Amplify across channels, and Evolve in real time.

There's a lot to unpack here.

• Express means leveraging AI to create content quickly and at lower cost. But brand voice and tone must come across clearly, and resulting content must appeal to the ideal customer.
• Tailor requires customer communications to be personal and hyper-targeted based on deep customer knowledge. This happens by enriching existing data with intent signals.
• Amplify gets interesting. I'll talk more about this tomorrow, but the idea is to put out more varieties of content, across more platforms, and to optimise for AI search engines.
• Evolve makes the loop continuous, with a never-ending cycle of iteration, learning, and execution.

New products and approach

HubSpot unveiled a slew of updates and new products for the AI era. For one, Smart CRM now automatically enriches records with unstructured data like emails, intent signals from website visits, and HubSpot proprietary data.

The new Data Hub brings together data from external sources with AI tools to simplify the process. This year also saw the announcement of new Breeze AI agents, and a new Breeze Studio let HubSpot users easily deploy or create AI agents.

The traditional marketing funnel isn't just evolving; it's being dismantled. When 60% of Google searches end without a click, when buyers bypass your website entirely, and when AI provides instant answers without attribution, the old playbook designed to drive buyers to your website is obsolete.

Indeed, the recurrent theme is how businesses built on SEO and content marketing are watching their traffic tank. HubSpot's Loop framework offers an updated strategy for today's AI-centric and social-driven world.

Do you agree that AI will completely change search and content?