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Bring out your dead! The company that says it built inbound in the first place is now writing its obituary, thanks in part to a shrug emoji, a hundred famous quotes, and a creative interpretation of an analyst report. In this week's feature, find out if you're pumping money into a process that is on life support or if reports of inbound's demise are greatly exaggerated.
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About 20% of small companies said financial constraints were keeping them from covering costs or pursuing new business, roughly twice the share of large ones, per the CFO Survey reported by CFO Dive. If they make up much of your customer base, break them out of the renewal forecast and test what weaker collections or expansion would do to it.
California's SaaS tax draft makes access dates and user location matter
A SaaS invoice paid in December 2026 can still be taxable in California if it covers access in January 2027. A payment made in January 2027 for December 2026 access would not be.
That is how California's tax agency proposes to handle the state's new sales and use tax on software that customers download or access remotely, including SaaS, starting Jan. 1, 2027. The CDTFA released draft emergency rules Sept. 1, and comments closed Sept. 24 (Holland & Knight).
The access period determines when the tax starts
The draft ties taxability to when the customer gets access, regardless of when the seller gets paid. Subscription periods before Jan. 1, 2027, are not taxable. Periods beginning on or after that date generally are, and another legal analysis treats each billing period as a separate sale.
One advisory firm takes a different view of a fixed multi-year contract that begins before January, arguing that payments covering 2027 and later would remain untaxed. The agency has not resolved that question in final rules.
For multi-state accounts, user location becomes part of the calculation
When a customer has users in several states, the draft treats allocation by user location as presumptively reasonable. Server location does not get that presumption. A seller can use another method if it is reasonable, consistent, documented and reflects California usage.
The rules also change who sends the money to the state at the top end. Once one buyer's purchases of these products from a single seller exceed $5 million in a year, the buyer reports and pays the tax instead of the seller.
Two firms tracking the rules expect final versions around December.
Founder read: The tax calculation may now depend on information owned by different parts of your company: the contract establishes the access period, your customer data establishes where users are, and billing determines what gets invoiced. Before 2027 renewals start going out, make sure those inputs can produce one defensible answer.
Salesforce is preparing to put agent traffic on the meter
Every successful call a registered AI agent makes to Salesforce through MCP or the API would count as an interaction that consumes Flex Credits. Salesforce has not said how many credits an interaction will use. It says customers will get 30 days' notice before metering starts (Salesforce Ben). Founder read: If Salesforce charges by successful agent interaction, call count becomes part of the agent's unit economics. Document and test the workflow, then measure calls per completed run.
H-1B reviews will now weigh an employer's layoffs
A Sept. 18 executive order directs agencies to consider an employer's recent or planned layoffs of similarly situated U.S. workers when adjudicating applications. It also gives the Labor Department 30 days to examine past filings (Gibson Dunn). Founder read: A layoff can now affect the expected value of a later H-1B filing. If both are under consideration, model the immigration consequence while the headcount plan is still changeable.
ABM got more expensive while prospecting and retargeting got cheaper
AdRoll's data for July through early September puts display prospecting CPMs 45% below a year earlier and retargeting 29.1% lower. ABM moved the other way, rising 4.4% year over year, although it still cost 15.1% less than in the second quarter (Search Engine Land). Founder read: Prospecting and retargeting got substantially cheaper while ABM got more expensive, so a channel mix built on last year's relative costs no longer matches this year's prices.
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A premature obituary for inbound
HubSpot says inbound is dead. Its evidence is much narrower.
HubSpot spent part of this year explaining why reports of its traffic collapse were too simplistic.
In a post updated July 14, chief marketing officer Kipp Bodnar wrote that the decline was "partly by design." HubSpot had begun moving away from broad informational content as far back as 2020, he said, shifting toward YouTube, podcasts, social media and other places where, in his words, it could focus on "cultivating influence rather than just providing information." He also wrote that transactional SEO remained strong even as informational traffic fell.
On August 10, HubSpot updated a guide called "Inbound Marketing Tips to Build a Lead-Generating Strategy." It described inbound as a way to attract customers with helpful content, build trust and reach buyers while they research.
Six weeks later, Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan went to Fortune with a different headline: "We built inbound marketing. Now we're burying it after losing 5 million blog visits per month." The article says the era HubSpot built is over. "That world ended when ChatGPT launched."
Quite a lot happened to inbound between August 10 and September 22.
Famous quotes and the shrug emoji
The Fortune piece doesn't date the 30-day traffic loss. The number closely matches a decline reported much earlier.
In January 2025, Search Engine Land cited Semrush data showing HubSpot's organic traffic falling from 13.5 million visits in November 2024 to 8.6 million in December, a loss of 4.9 million. Google released both a core update and a spam update during the same period. Those are third-party estimates; HubSpot has not published its own analytics.
Search consultant Aleyda Solis looked at which pages were losing visibility. In January 2024, the blog subdomain accounted for 77% of HubSpot's organic search traffic. By December, it accounted for 42%.
Among the pages losing ground were "The 100+ Most Famous Quotes of All Time" and "How to Type the Shrug Emoji." Solis described the losers as pages about "very popular but not so relevant topics for Hubspot business." Some on-topic guides gained rankings during the same period.
That makes the 5 million figure hard to use as a verdict on inbound. It measures lost visits without telling us how many came from people HubSpot had a reasonable chance of turning into customers.
HubSpot's July explanation made essentially the same distinction. The company said it had already been reducing its dependence on broad informational traffic because page views were a poor measure of the influence it wanted to create.
By September, a traffic decline of the same size had become evidence that inbound's era was over.
A convenient translation
The Fortune argument gets broader from there.
It says that by 2027 or 2028, "industry projections suggest as many as 95% of buyer journeys will start in a large language model."
The link goes to Gartner. Gartner's forecast says that by 2027, 95% of seller research workflows will begin with AI, up from less than 20% in 2024.
HubSpot's version changes both the person and the behavior. Sellers become buyers. Research workflows become buyer journeys. Gartner's forecast about sellers using AI in their research becomes evidence that customers will begin purchasing decisions inside an LLM.
That is a much more useful statistic if you're arguing that inbound marketing has stopped working. Gartner forecast something else.
HubSpot's own research from earlier this year is also more measured. Its State of Marketing 2026 write-up, based on more than 1,500 marketers, described websites, blogs and SEO as the most popular and impactful channels. Another HubSpot page citing the report says nearly 30% of marketers had seen decreased search traffic as consumers turned to AI tools.
HubSpot's own published material doesn't show that buyers have abandoned the channels inbound was built around.
A search can now end before the click
There is much stronger evidence for a narrower problem.
Pew Research Center tracked the Google use of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025. When a search produced an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits. Without an AI summary, they clicked in 15%. Links inside the AI summary received clicks in just 1% of visits.
Ahrefs later compared Search Console data for 150,000 keywords with AI Overviews against 150,000 informational keywords without them. It reported in May 2026 that AI Overviews were associated with a 58% lower average clickthrough rate for top-ranking pages. Pages ranking 10th lost nearly 20% of their clicks.
Seer Interactive found the same gap across 53 mid-sized and large brands. Organic clickthrough on searches with an AI Overview was 1.3% in December 2025 and 2.4% in February 2026, compared with 3.8% when no overview appeared.
The Ahrefs and Seer studies concern informational searches. They give us much less information about branded searches, product comparisons or queries from someone already looking for software like yours.
AI tools are not replacing the lost traffic at anything close to the same volume. Similarweb's U.S. consumer panel found visits to AI platforms up 28.6% between January 2025 and January 2026 while referrals from those platforms to external sites stayed flat. Agency data reported by Search Engine Land put LLM referrals below 2% of referral traffic, although those visits converted at roughly 18%. Growth rates run the other way: BrightEdge reported ChatGPT referrals up 101% from January to August, with no base stated, and HubSpot said in April that organic traffic across its customers was down 27% year over year, with no method published.
For a content program, that creates a specific problem. The "what is," "how to" and other general questions that historically produced large search audiences can increasingly be answered before the user reaches your site. HubSpot's famous-quotes and shrug-emoji pages lost their rankings in a Google update, and the information on them was both generic and distant from the product.
A pricing comparison, an integration page, a product guide or an answer to a question prospects repeatedly ask sales is doing a different job. The research above does not show that those pages have lost the same value.
HubSpot may ultimately be right that the inbound playbook "wasn't built for" this era, in its words. The click data gives a much clearer reason to change a content budget: informational traffic that once looked valuable because it was plentiful can disappear without taking an equal amount of buying demand with it.
The budget decision starts one level below organic traffic, with the queries and pages that disappeared.
A model upgrade can change the product without changing its positioning. Dunford gives you three things to recheck: the alternatives buyers compare you with, the capabilities that distinguish you, and the value themes those capabilities support. Run the exercise after the next meaningful model or feature change using notes from recent prospect calls. If those three still hold, your messaging may need updating while the positioning stays where it is.
A team can define a qualified lead before they know which ones will buy. Ward works backward from closed deals. Start at 20:47, where she builds the definition from customers who converted, and stop at 31:46, after the segment on making rejection reason a required CRM field. The approach assumes you have at least one SDR.
Some customers who cancel come back. In ChartMogul's billing data, 45% of returning customers came back within 30 days and 66% within 90, and most returned without moving to a cheaper plan. Read "What teams should take away from this," then pull last quarter's cancellations and see whether your outreach matches the window in which they returned.
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I run The Pricing Reset, a six-week engagement for founders of sales-led B2B SaaS companies whose product has outgrown the pricing they set a few years ago. I rebuild the packaging, price points and discount rules, then help put the new pricing live on new deals so the team can run it without every exception landing on the founder.
The work continues through a 90-day measurement window, with check-ins at days 30, 60 and 90 and a final readout against the company's own starting numbers.
If your pricing has not kept pace with the product, book a 20-minute call at redwoodridge.net/book, or reply with your current pricing page. I'll tell you whether The Pricing Reset applies and, if it doesn't, what I'd look at instead.
Thanks for reading. See you next Wednesday.
— Jason
P.S. Hit reply and tell me: how did your last three new customers first hear about you?
