00:29:18 · Kieran Flanagan
[00:29:18] S0: No, we were early to pivot the SEO team into like SEO plus and trends and optimization. Now SEO, a lot of that traffic was informational. And informational is basically we acquired so much traffic because we figured out how to teach you things. And then based upon teaching you things, we could monetize a small sliver of that traffic. But because we acquired so much traffic, it actually equated to a lot of customers. So you have your informational. That all went because... Why did that go? Because AI turned informational content into actionable content. Right? Forever, we would... You think of pre AI, I would be like, okay. You know, I really need to figure out how to make my Facebook ads much, much better. And so I Google, like, top 10 ways to make my Facebook ad ad campaigns, like, way better. And I read that, and then I figure out how to apply that. AI is, like, killed that now because AI is reading the blog post. And I go into AI and they say, make my Facebook campaign better. And it... Like, it's reading the blog post, and it's doing the action for you. So it's completely killed the need for a lot of informational content. But transactional search still works pretty well, which is, hey. I'm searching for products, and then I'm doing this kind of initial research, and I'm trying to figure out what's the right products for me. So there's still some value in ranking for transactional keywords, which are ones that were... That are in the buying process. However, I still think all of that's going to disappear into the AI engines because the AI engines are gonna be a much better source for you to understand how to buy products. And I think there's a stat that says by 2027... So traditionally, 80% of all buyer journeys in B2B started on search. By 2027, which is next year, which is crazy, it's predicted that 80% of them will start in answer engines. And I suspect we'll see by the end of the decade everything start in an answer engine. I I don't know what Google are gonna do with their blue links. And so we were pivoted pretty hard into how do we appear in ChatGPT, how do we appear in all these answer engines, and become... We are the most visible brand in our vertical now in those answer engines, and we figured out how to kind of become more visible there.
00:31:22 · Kieran Flanagan, Guillaume Moubeche
But the, you know, the difference is that traffic is way less measurable and trackable, which is a problem. [00:31:28] S1: Do you feel like the best way to improve, like, your... I think it's called GEO, like the optimization on ChatGPT and other, like, LLMs. Like, do you think that the... All the content you created on YouTube, the fact that you're partnering with creators, etcetera, has helped you, like, tremendously? Like, what do you think is the impact of social on all of that?
00:31:52 · Kieran Flanagan
[00:31:52] S0: Yeah. No. If you look at where the platform source citations from, so citations really drive how visible you are in these platforms. And they're constantly changing these, so you'd have to go and, like, refresh. You'd have to go ask them what their big... You know, you can go get this information. For example, OpenAI used to rely heavily on Reddit, and I think over time, it's tried to decouple itself from Reddit. But it certainly is looking at places like YouTube. Google is in particular looking at YouTube. They look at LinkedIn. So the part of the value of having and working with creators is not only in the impressions or direct conversions, but it's also in driving citations. And, you know, the example... A good example of this is affiliate programs. Like affiliate programs, you would actually pay someone to promote you. They would have an affiliate link. They would click on that link, and then they get a certain percentage of that revenue. Now you could have an affiliate network that is really just for citations. Right? Like, that actually is talking about you in all these different places, and they don't even add a they don't even to add a link. They just need to, like, mention your brand with the phrases that you care about. And that actually can improve your visibility in these answer engines.
00:32:58 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:32:58] S1: What's your feeling about like Google? Because you mentioned like potentially like 80% of the B2B traffic will come, you know, from LLM. So do you think that they're gonna move towards, like, a Gemini only interface, or do you think that they're gonna keep the search as it is? Like
00:33:17 · Kieran Flanagan
[00:33:17] S0: I think Google still wins search, it's just what is search? I think the cons... I think the people who lose are the publishers. And so what's interesting is when people have the search discussion, they talk about the disruption in, like, search is dead or Google is dead. I might have been... I might have said that before. If you actually look at the data, search volume is going up. Right? So the amount of people who are searching is going up because AI is actually bringing in a whole host of new people who can ask questions. What's actually going down is click through rate. It's like the number of people who actually click on anything to actually learn anything because AI gives you the answer. And so I suspect Google in the future is still going to own predominantly be, you know, the owners of search. It's just what is search? Right? Search is probably their AI overviews. I think I was always pretty bullish on a... They had it as a test project two or three years ago where they showed a future search kind of video of how the future search could work, and it was like dynamic UIs. And so you would search for something, and the AI itself would build like a UI wrapped around whatever your search would be. So if you said, what are the best restaurants? The UI would return those search results was completely unique to that search. It wasn't the 10 blue links. It was... It had crafted like a mini app for all intension purposes. And so I think search is just gonna become way more custom. You know, I asked my personal assistant to do something. It can either do it or build me a custom UI to help me figure out how to do it. But I don't think we're gonna be in a world where you have a singular page that has template links, every time you search, it looks kinda similar.
00:34:47 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:34:47] S1: Yeah. It's gonna be interesting. And and for you, like, in the next year, because I think it's hard to bet on multiple years, but what's your big bet with HubSpot? Like, why are you investing heavily in term of customer acquisition? Because, I mean, when you look at your scale, like more than 3,000,000,000 in revenue, and I think last quarter or Q2, you grew like by 20%. It's insane growth for this scale, so you have to, you know, like find more and more customers and expand like revenue. So what's kind of, like, the the big bet you are doing?