Why Website Traffic Is Almost Dead Today

0:00Eric Siu:Using only 20 % of your business data is like dating someone who only texts emojis. First of all, that's annoying. And second, you're missing a lot of context. But that's how most businesses operate today, using only 20 % of their data. Unless you have HubSpot, where all the emails, call logs, and chat messages turn into insights to grow your business. Because all that data makes all the difference. I would know because I use HubSpot at my company. Learn more at HubSpot.com.

0:29Neil Patel:So Neil, let me show you this table over here. You actually hit on one of the topics I have here.

0:34Eric Siu:So check this out. So this guy over here, Danny Critchon, Critchon, Critchon, Danny Critchon post this. So he says, no discussion of tech media can get past this basic traffic fact. In the AI world, Google and social no longer refers traffic, which means that the vast majority of readers just never find you in the first place. Here's the analysis over here, right? So you see digital trends, peak traffic, 8.5 million in 2024, March 2024. January 2026, 264 ,000. Wow. 97 % decline, right? Remember ZDNet? 7.6 million visits per month, February 2024, 768 ,000 minus 90%, right? So like Wired.com, 7.7 million November 2024, drops to 2.9 million, negative 62%.

1:17Eric Siu:Dude, so I think, by the way, like what Neil said, he's not wrong, right? But I think it's just really interesting to look at these big publications from the past, how they some of them have adapted, but I don't think a lot of them have adapted.

1:30Neil Patel:The bigger problem with publications is they're creating informational content. Informational content is the stuff that's getting hit the hardest. The content that's more transactional, navigational, that's the stuff where you can still get a ton of traffic and more importantly, revenue. because if someone wants to talk about, let's say with CNET, they talk about computer-related stuff or how-to geek. I've never been to how-to geek, but I'm assuming it's computer-related stuff. If you go to CNET and you're reading an article on how to optimize the memory in your computer and make it more efficient so your PC is more quicker because memory is a big issue in AI, right?

2:07Neil Patel:Not a lot of people are talking about that, but this is why companies like Dell are booming. And with that article, Google in AI Overviews or AI Mode or Gemini or ChatGPT or Perplexer or Claude, they're just pulling in what to look for and how to fix it so that way you don't have to go to CNET. Reading that article on CNET produces some revenue, but it produces some revenue typically on the ad front. On the flip side, transactional keywords, navigational keywords, these are more bottom of funnel. They drive revenue. People still go to websites for it. Even if they don't go to your website and an AI agent just helps you finish the transaction on their website, that works too.

2:45Neil Patel:At least you're capturing revenue. Who cares if you get the visitor? You just want the revenue. That's really the end game. And if you're like, no, I want the visitor, you're looking at the wrong metrics in your marketing and you have been for years. Yes, I get how more visitors in theory relate to more revenue, but even three years ago, five years ago, before all this stuff, your number one metric that you should have been looking at is revenue, LTV, profitability, even more than traffic or followers or likes. But it's the type of content that people are creating and the informational ones are getting hit the hardest.

3:21Neil Patel:And a lot of businesses haven't adapted from just shifting away to, we're just going to cover everything related to marketing. Like what is SEO? Well, that's cool and all, but there's already a million articles. Now, even if you don't get traffic, you do want to make sure you're covering your topic thoroughly on your website because you still want AI and Google to pull from you, even if you don't get the traffic because you're building up the authority and the brand visibility and they're more likely to cite you. But you just don't want to target all informational keywords like what is marketing?

3:56Neil Patel:Well, that's been beaten to death and a million sites hypothetically have covered that.

4:00Eric Siu:I think a lot of this just comes down to adaptability at the end of the day. So we've talked about search everywhere optimization to death over these last few years. And so a lot of these like digital trends, for example, they just didn't adapt their business models and they were not quick enough, right? Versus the ones who have, let's use Andreessen Horowitz as an example, right? I was actually listening to a podcast where Ben Horowitz and Mark Andreessen were talking about the new media model that they have, where they get to control the narrative. And they have multiple podcasts going on. They have like multiple YouTube channels.

4:32Eric Siu:They've really kind of mastered the media game, not just for themselves, but also for their portfolio companies as well. But that's a good example of a company adapting because, you know, the reason part of the reason why they did it was because they were getting attacked all the time by like the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. But now the Internet, they realize that the Internet has changed and you want to be able to own the conversation. And that's what they have done. Right. And so I think that that's that's the name of the game here. Like, don't get me wrong, like Neil and I first started in SEO.

4:58Eric Siu:And when we look at this, it's like, yeah, it sucks. And like our traffic has declined. I don't know if we've declined 97%. We definitely haven't. But we've also adapted to kind of appear on other channels. You want to know something interesting, Neil? So yesterday I was talking to Apple and I was like, okay, we're ready to pull the trigger on some of these Mac Ultras, right? I was like, but we need the 512 gigabyte unified RAM. And they're like, we don't have those anymore. I'm like, why don't you have them? He's like, because we're sold out. I'm like, oh, damn it. so it's like you do need if you're going to run local models you do need the 512 at minimum um you can't have 256 because like a model like a kimmy 2.5 which is an open source model runs on like 240 or something like that so you don't have much wiggle room there so i'm like okay well you know my strategy now is like okay if i'm going to buy these mac ultras i was going to buy like one old one because it's a mac uh it's on the m3 ultra chip but the m5 is about to come out i thought it was going to come out this week it didn't come out this week it's going to come out in like two months or so so my point of saying all this is that i think a lot of people are buying um you know on-prem um at least for themselves and run local models because neil i spent five grand just on my own anthropic api key in the last 30 days or so and that stuff's going to keep adding up i'm like god damn it if i'm sorry pardon my language damn it okay if i released my open claw to my team and they're all using it like crazy you're going to town i need to have local models if I want to save the monies.

6:22Neil Patel:Yeah. Dude, RAM is super important. People forget that. They all think like these GPUs or CPUs, I forgot whatever they call it. I think they're called GPUs. Like the NVIDIA chips, AMD chips, and all that kind of stuff, the TPUs. But they forget that you also need tons and tons of RAM. And without that, it doesn't work.

6:45Eric Siu:You know the research I did on this yesterday? What was I using? Was I using Claude? was I using OpenAI? I was using none of those. I was using Gemini AI mode for this, okay? And I was like, okay, so give me a crawl, walk, run for this. Like, what do I need to do? So my crawl, walk, run, just if anyone's interested for my local on-prem setup, is I'm going to have multiple Mac studios, okay? And each one of those is like 10 to 15 grand, by the way. So you have a few of those, okay? One might be running the local models or the open source models locally, but you might have some for clients. You might have some for like your team's agents and all that.

7:19Eric Siu:But the other thing too is you actually will need an NVIDIA, like one of those CUDA chips as well. Because if you want one of those, that's going to decrease the time it takes to get these tokens out. So if your team starts complaining about, hey, it's taking too long to get answers. Well, that's when you start to need to include one of these$10 ,000 to$15 ,000 to$20 ,000 NVIDIA CUDA chips. So my guess, Neil, is you're going to probably be buying from NVIDIA soon as well.

7:43Neil Patel:So we'll see. We could be. I have no idea what the heck my team buys half the time. I just see the card bills and I stopped looking at them because I used to go line item by line item. It's just so much stuff to go through and line item by line item now.

7:57Eric Siu:Dude, you can't just the line items for our podcast cost sooner than I do.

8:03Neil Patel:I have a tendency to just nitpick every expense.

8:07Eric Siu:And it's like, what is this? It shouldn't be this. It shouldn't be this. And at the same time, I'm like, I don't know. So yeah. But the good news is HubSpot, which is our sponsor, those checks should start to come in soon at some point. So we will see. Yeah. By the way, Neil, did you see how Intercom, they talked about reinventing themselves into doing$400 million in ARR?

8:29Neil Patel:I did not see that. I'm really curious about this. Do you want to catch me? Okay, yeah. I'll share my screen.

8:35Eric Siu:Then I'll get your reaction first to this. Okay, so I don't know how you pronounce the name. I don't know if it's like Owen. so he's the CEO of Intercom okay so originally Intercom was like a like a help desk software like a Zen desk or like a like a little chat bot you have in the bottom right of your screen Neil did I miss anything there that basically was the original version of Intercom think of a chat

9:01Neil Patel:that pops up in your bottom right corner and that chat was human powered right and it was mainly humans using it although i think you could have some pre-filled tags and you could input a database but those were never that great it was never that great yeah okay so intercom i think they were

9:17Eric Siu:maybe at some point in the last couple years or so they're maybe doing 100 million in arr now today they're doing 400 million okay so um so the ceo and founder he left for actually two to three years or so okay and then it was only when chat gpt came out where that was the existential kind of code red moment for them um and they started building fin fin is actually their customer service agent um that i actually interacted with one yesterday where it actually answers and solves questions um it's basically your automated customer service team did i miss anything there

9:46Neil Patel:no and it's really good and to be clear when intercom made this pivot instead of saying hey intercom.com you can get all this stuff i believe it was like fin.ai or they they create a separate brand, separate products, so that way there wasn't confusion to get more adoption in the market.

10:04Eric Siu:Yeah. So I'll kind of give you the TLDR on this post. I highly recommend you read it because it's got 870 ,000 views on Twitter. But so Owen says, look, I'm going to offer Intercom, the company I run, as a case study to help me explain how SaaS companies can be saved and share the things we did starting three years ago to find relevance in this new world. We found ourselves being referred to as the Poster Boys for Success as a late stage SaaS company in AI. and I'd like to first share some numbers and background context to help you understand why that is. So three years ago, our future was looking pretty bleak.

10:34Eric Siu:I jumped back into the CEO role after a two-year hiatus while sick, while we were heading quickly towards negative growth. All SaaS growth rates fell as the ZERP days waned, zero interest rate policy, and ours fell extra hard due to unfocused business strategy that led to poor product market fit. A month later, chat chiquity was announced and we all begin our collective gradual and still ongoing journey to try to understand what that all means. I'll give you a simplified meme version of the story first. Step one, AI. Step two, a lot of question marks. Step three, profit. Because I'll be explaining the how shortly after.

11:07Eric Siu:But in summary, we launched our new service, Fin, in the summer of 2023. So now we're talking two and a half years or so. And our business began to violently recover thereafter. By the way, look at this chart. So Neil, I'll let you kind of explain this chart. It's too small for me to see. Oh, you can't see. Okay, so basically what you have here is you can see in 2021, okay, 2020 happens, right? So everything starts moving up. Intercom growth rate is like a high of 37%, okay? But 2021, okay, it drops to 31 % growth rate, then 30%, then 24%, then 18%, then 12%. At 12%, when it's like it's coming down a cliff right now, that's when the CEO change happens and he comes back in, okay?

11:47Eric Siu:Okay. So CEO, like, by the way, CEO change happens. Intercom growth rate drops from 12%, 7%, 5%, 4%. When it's at 4 % at their lowest, that's when they launch FIN. And right when that launch happens, 4%, 6%, 7%, 9%, all the way back up. My camera's blocking the way, but it goes up to like 30, 37%, 37%, all the way back up to 37%. And they're crushing the average, like you see the black line over here that's the average sas growth rate they are now well above that and that's that's the recovery story right so um they're now 400 million ar overall with fin about to pass 100

12:24Neil Patel:million uh go ahead yeah but when eric's showing 37 growth their growth rate is higher with a higher base to grow at 37 when you're doing 400 million dollars that means you're adding 148 million dollars in revenue that's recurring each and every single year. But here's the kicker, right? So if they're at 400 right now and they grow 37%, next year they're at 548, hypothetically, assuming the growth rate stays flat, but their growth rate is actually increasing. So let's say if they just maintain 37 % growth, it's 548 because they added 148 million. And then when you look at the 548, hey, 37 % growth on that is 202.

13:12Neil Patel:So it keeps compounding. So then there'll be over$700 million. And I bet you at that point, they'll go public. Cool.

13:19Eric Siu:So let's talk about how they did it, right? So then the main gist of his article here without reading the entire thing is this. At Intercom, we destroyed so many things, big and small. We ripped up our old values and created new disruptive ones, which we then hired and fired against to drive the behavior we needed in this new world. We rewrote our mission to focus on our agent goals and we changed our targets to fin revenue. We switched up our board, removing mature and experienced leaders for startup founders. We moved our R &D focus to be nearly 80 % on fin while that business was still a single digit percent of our revenue.

13:51Eric Siu:We created a whole new brand and a separate site with a separate$1 million.ai domain, ouch, and drove 100 % of our paid traffic to it. Every bit of marketing said fin, fin, fin, not intercom. And it was risky. Big picture brand and positioning, marketing to hopefully pay off later versus incremental performance marketing to definitely pay off that quarter. So again, while Finn was a single digit percent of our revenue, all because we needed a market to give us a new look for a new category, we aggressively promoted and compensate our AI team above others. We grew up from six people to 60 people in three years with real PhD level AI scientists and researchers.

14:25Eric Siu:We built out our own AI and trained our foundational models more on that soon. So the main thing he's calling out here is this. We did not hold back on the creative destruction. And that really is the only idea I'm trying to sell here. We deserted our past to make way for our future. So what I just mentioned earlier, he's like, you know, we got rid of our entire board for screw experience. We bet all in on the single digit thing that wasn't even the main thing. And they just ripped everything apart and they were willing to destroy everything for the future. And I think not many people are willing to do that.

14:55And so he's saying, look, this shit is insanely hard.

14:59Eric Siu:The shift from on-prem to cloud wrecked many companies, but the change was not nearly as fast. And while it proved quite difficult, right, I think this shift is, he's like, look, it's hard to do this shift, but little old left for dead 15-year-old intercom did it. You can do it too. You have the brand, the customer base, the cash flows, and the access to debt. So what do you think?

15:17Neil Patel:Dude, I think spot on. The big thing here that I think a lot of people need to take away, at least from marketing and business lesson, is sometimes people try to adapt their old products or create old products. but there's brands and people perceive a brand for a specific thing. It's really hard to reinvent a brand and say, Hey, we used to do this, but now we're this. Sometimes people just have a pigeonhole on what you do. So sometimes the best approach to move forward is to not try to convince everyone your brands change. It's to launch a new brand that's owned by the main parent company that focuses on this new thing and you get easier adoption in many cases and you start seeing a quicker uptick.

16:01Neil Patel:That's at least what we've noticed because it's hard to please the old customers and the new customers at the same time. So in many cases, it's easier to launch a new brand.

16:09Eric Siu:So you know what I want to call out here is, I'll call out this last line that he has here. So it says, look, I want you to survive it and win. So this change being this AI change, right? All it will take is destroying everything you love. So here's what's happening right now, at least for me, the experience shares from my side. Supplement companies are growing very quickly. Crypto companies are growing very quickly. They're coming and they're seeing the content that I'm putting out. They're saying, hey, we want to do what you do. And then internally, the struggle that we're having right now is that you can't just be button pushers for paid media.

16:40Eric Siu:You can't just say, I'm going to do keyword research and do traditional SEO. It doesn't work anymore, right? So what we're doing from a creative destruction standpoint is my CTO, Leveraging Open Claw, last week. we are actually building something that's actually promoting a fin-like product, right, for another company. But we're building all the scaffolding for the cold outbound, the voice phone calls, right, with voice mails as well from the AI. And also we're building the agents to kind of fulfill everything from end to end, right? Now, everything from like the software stuff, we're just like, let's just give that all away or at least do freemium for all that and then have those be lead magnets that lead up to kind of the main things over here.

17:23Eric Siu:And then the dashboard that you saw earlier, that's all going to plug in together, right? So that's how we see all this doing, but without this coming together, but without an open claw and a clawed code, we wouldn't be able to do this as quickly. And so I think it's easier for us because we're smaller to be able to kind of move quickly like this. But I think if you're a larger company like Intercom, for example, it's more difficult. And he had to make that bet to just say, you know, F it all in. and it paid off for him at least so far.