Company blogs are no longer worth the investment
Would you believe me if I told you that this newsletter gets more monthly views than the Salesforce blog?
Stay ahead with real-time market insights from Semrush .Trends. Timing is everything in digital marketing and business strategy. Semrush .Trends now delivers daily & weekly traffic insights, helping you track competitor moves, industry trends, and market shifts as they happen. → Try it now!
For years, launching a company blog was marketing 101 – maybe second only to a new CMO swooping in to redo the homepage… or trying to build yet another new category. The formula was simple: Build a content engine, drive organic traffic, get sign-ups/leads, and get that thought leadership out there.
But that playbook isn’t working anymore. Company blogs are experiencing major traffic stagnation - or even decline - among some of the biggest names in B2B SaaS (once known for their content empires).
Shoutout to Semrush for the data. While the exact numbers may vary, the overall trend is undeniable: B2B’s largest company blogs are dying.
HubSpot blog
Hubspot blog is still pulling in millions of visits, but 2025 traffic is hitting new lows.
As scary as this looks, Kieran Flanagan (VP, Marketing @ HubSpot) explains that this trend line is under control and even (gasp!) intentional. In his LinkedIn post, he says that the landscape is shifting. Here’s what you can learn from this (summarized):
Influence is rising – HubSpot invested early in influential marketing (The Hustle, podcasts, YouTube) and now sees demand from these channels matching and outpacing blogs.
SEO needs better fit – Vanity traffic isn't the goal; ROI matters. HubSpot pruned 30K+ blog pages that didn’t convert and refined its SEO strategy for relevance.
AI is disrupting search – No-click searches are increasing, making organic traffic harder to scale for B2B.
AI search optimization is key – HubSpot’s YouTube content is seeing strong growth in AI-driven searches like ChatGPT.
Salesforce blog
Salesforce blog is seeing stagnant growth, hovering just north of 200K visits/month.
Gong blog
Gong has seen lots of success with thought leadership over the years, yet it’s now barely pulling in 10K visits/month.
Intercom blog
Intercom blog has been on a downward trend since… well, the beginning of this chart. Now at ~25K visits/month.
Miro blog
Miro has more traffic than Intercom and Gong combined at 50K visits/month, but it not really growing.
Atlassian blog
Atlassian's blog is surprisingly getting more traffic than Salesforce’s and is the only one I found that’s actually trending upward… but still, it gets <400K visits/month.
A common thread across all of these companies is low traffic volume and stagnant growth. Now, of course, it’s not just about traffic - after all, traffic can be a vanity metric. The real goal is attracting your ideal customer profile (ICP) and converting them into users or buyers. But if these juggernauts - with brand authority, distribution channels, and sophisticated content strategies - are barely pulling 200K visits/month, what does that mean for everyone else? It forces you to reconsider whether a company blog is the best growth lever or if other strategies might yield better ROI.
Why are company blogs losing relevance?
Search isn’t what it used to be
Since 80%+ of the market still runs on Google, let’s start there. For years, there was a healthy tension between Google Search and Google Ads – one focused on helping users, the other on making money. Better search meant fewer clicks, faster answers, and a cleaner experience. But over time, that balance shifted.
In 2023, Google trial documents revealed what many already suspected: Google deliberately made Search worse to squeeze more ad revenue. The longer you scroll, the more ads they can serve. So not only do their algorithms mess with content distribution, but the degraded search experience drives people away.
Experts and creators are turning to newsletters (free and paid) and private communities (like Discord and Slack) instead.
As Sam Ogborn (Adjunct Professor of Social Media/Content at Miami University) puts it, we’re living in a “two-tiered internet”:
The Public Web: AI-generated or recycled content, indexed by Google and other search engines.
The Private Web: Original insights and expert analysis, locked behind paywalls or walled-off communities (i.e., unless content is publicly available, Google can’t index it).
You’re seeing the shift firsthand - after all, you’re here on Substack. 👀
Of course, there’s an AI story here
AI isn't just disrupting SEO – it is becoming the new interface for content, instantly retrieving, refining, and summarizing information from multiple sources with just a few prompts.
More and more people feel like this:
People trust people, not companies
Trust in big companies is at an all-time low – slow growth and layoffs aren’t helping. And corporate content? Well, it’s corporate: predictable, detached, and rarely saying anything bold. They’re fundamentally restricted. You won’t find any hot takes there.
But this shift has been happening for years. Just look at the rise of operators, founders, and employees becoming creators. Especially in the age of AI, people want to hear other people’s authentic perspectives, not a company’s perspective.
What’s actually doing well – creator economy
While corporate blogs struggle to gain traction, independent creators are thriving in places like Substack, Medium, even LinkedIn. Just look at Substack’s YoY traffic growth – it’s now pulling in 100M+ visits a month and climbing.
Real-life Substack stats
My blog gets 300K+ visits per month (with each weekly post averaging 40-70K views) – that’s bigger than Miro, Gong, and even Salesforce’s blog - 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯. How can that possibly be!?
And I’m peanuts compared to someone like Lenny Rachitsky. Lenny’s Newsletter gets a whopping 4.75M visits per month. That’s right, folks - you read that correctly - almost 5 MILLION, on par with HubSpot’s blog. The difference? HubSpot likely has a large content team behind those numbers, while Lenny’s operation – though not a solo effort – is still significantly leaner by comparison. The fact that an independent creator can match its reach says A LOT.
What should companies do, then?
Company blogs may be dying, but content isn’t. The key is to shift resources to more effective strategies.
Get more eyes via the creator economy
Instead of relying solely on company-generated content, put money where the audience already is: the creator economy. Sponsor newsletters, social posts, or podcast mentions from creators who have built active and engaged communities.
Think about it this way: On the low end, an editor’s $100K salary can be covered by 20 sponsorships at $5K each for posts that get ~50K views. That’s over 1M views from a highly relevant audience - more than Salesforce blog generates annually. Suddenly, you’re tapping into multiple high-traffic channels, gaining more reach with less effort, and increasing your chances of attracting new prospects.
Invest in other organic channels
YouTube is booming right now - if you're not there, you're missing out on a massive opportunity. The same goes for podcasts and online communities. Diversify your organic strategy beyond just static content - expand into dynamic, high-engagement platforms where your prospects are actively spending their time.
Create high-value content
Summary blogs are not it – maybe even the word “blog” in general needs to go. Instead, invest your efforts into content that is hyper specific to you as a company. Even if these can still be aggregated by AI, this content is essential:
Product docs & knowledge bases – Users still need high-quality product education and documentation
Landing pages & case studies – Content that helps with conversion and decision-making.
User-Generated Content (UGC) – I’m a big fan of UGC (if you can’t already tell). Not only do you feature real users and their work, it’s a growth loop.
Is investing in a blog still worth it?
Company blogs aren’t disappearing overnight, but they’re losing relevance and their role in content strategy is shrinking. The old playbook of just cranking out blog posts for SEO might not cut it anymore. It’s worth reevaluating whether the blog is truly a growth engine - or just a checkbox that companies keep ticking out of habit.
The brands that win will adapt, experiment, and figure out how to meet people where they actually are. The question isn’t whether blogging still works. It’s whether your content is built for the internet of today – or the one that existed 10 years ago.
Edited by Melissa Halim
Love this post Elena. Amazing shifts well underway.
Paraphrased: Content is still king. The content consumption landscape has just evolved. It always has. There was a day when a cat video thrived on MySpace. Now that video thrives on TikTok.