By
Austin Coker
A marketing lead at a $10M SaaS company opens the quarterly report. Organic sessions are down year over year, but demo requests are flat, and a growing number of form fills say the same thing in the “how did you hear about us” field: “ChatGPT recommended you.”
That’s inbound marketing in 2026.
Inbound marketing is a strategy where you attract buyers by creating content and experiences they’re already looking for, rather than interrupting them with ads or cold outreach. The principle hasn’t changed. What changed is where buyers look, which is now often an AI answer before it’s your website.
In this article, you’ll learn what inbound marketing is, what AI search changed about it, whether it still works, and how to run an inbound program built for how buyers search now.
Inbound marketing still works in 2026, but it no longer depends on ranking a blog post and waiting for clicks. Buyers get answers from Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity, so inbound now means being the brand those answers cite or recommend. That shifts effort toward buying-intent pages, third-party mentions and measuring pipeline instead of sessions.
Inbound marketing means earning attention instead of buying it. You publish useful content, such as guides, tools, comparisons and case studies, so that buyers find you while they research a problem, and you make it easy for them to take the next step when they’re ready.
HubSpot, which popularized the term, describes inbound as a flywheel with three stages: attract, engage and delight (source: HubSpot). You attract strangers with helpful content, engage them with solutions to their problem, and delight customers so they refer others, which feeds the next turn of the wheel.
The opposite is outbound marketing: cold email, cold calls, display ads and trade shows, where you start the conversation. Most growing companies use both. The difference is who initiates.
The classic inbound path was simple: rank in Google, earn the click, convert the visitor. AI search broke the middle step.
Pew Research Center analyzed March 2025 browsing data from 900 US adults and found that when a Google AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, compared with 15% without one (source: Pew Research Center). Ahrefs studied 300,000 keywords and found the presence of an AI Overview correlated with about 58% lower click-through rate for the page in position one (source: Ahrefs).
Informational content took the biggest hit, and that was the top of the traditional inbound funnel. We cover the full picture in our guide to zero-click search.
At Google I/O in May 2026, Sundar Pichai said AI Overviews has more than 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode, Google’s conversational search tab, more than 1 billion (source: Business Insider). Google also says AI Mode queries are three times longer than traditional searches (source: Google). Buyers describe their whole situation and get a tailored answer, which you can learn to target in our Google AI Mode guide.
OpenAI says more than 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT every week (source: OpenAI). For many buyers, “what’s the best X for a company like mine?” now goes to a chatbot, which returns a short list of named brands. If you’re on that list, you start the sales conversation with borrowed credibility. If you’re not, you may never know the buyer existed.
What gets a brand recommended is a mix of classic SEO and something inbound marketers historically under-invested in: what other sites say about you. Answer engines lean on the comparison articles, review sites, Reddit threads and trade publications they retrieve. This is the work of generative engine optimization.
In September 2025, HubSpot, the company most associated with inbound, introduced a new framework called the Loop (source: HubSpot). “The old funnel assumed customers would come to you,” said HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar in the announcement. “But when 60% of searches never leave Google and AI is answering questions before prospects even click, that playbook is broken.”
The Loop has four stages: express (define your brand’s taste and point of view), tailor (personalize with your data), amplify (show up across the channels and AI engines where buyers are) and evolve (learn from results and adjust) (source: HubSpot). HubSpot positions it as building on inbound’s principles of educating customers and creating value, not throwing them out. It’s a useful framework, though you don’t need to adopt any vendor’s model to act on the same shift.
Yes, with conditions. Buyers still research before they buy, and they still prefer vendors who helped them understand the problem. What no longer works is publishing a high volume of generic top-of-funnel posts and measuring success in sessions.
Gartner predicted back in February 2024 that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 as AI chatbots became substitute answer engines (source: Gartner). Whatever the exact number turns out to be, the direction is clear. The inbound programs that hold up are built around buying intent, original proof and being cited, not around keyword volume.
Book a call and we’ll show you where your brand appears in ChatGPT and Google’s AI answers, and where competitors are winning instead.
Here’s the program we’d run for a brand doing $1M to $50M in revenue.
Build your list from the bottom up. Start with pricing, comparison, alternatives, “best X for Y” and use-case queries, plus the prompts buyers type into ChatGPT and AI Mode. Then add the problem-aware questions that lead to them. Awareness content still has a role, but it should link into pages that can convert.
Use question-style headings and answer each one in the first one or two sentences. Add tables, steps and specific numbers. Google says optimizing for generative AI search is “still SEO” and that there are no special requirements to appear in AI features (source: Google Search Central), so the basics, crawlable pages, clear structure and genuine expertise, carry the most weight.
Case studies with dates and numbers, original survey data, pricing benchmarks and teardown-style comparisons are what earn links, citations and trust. Generic definitions are everywhere, and AI already summarizes them for free.
Run your priority prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Mode, and note which third-party pages get cited. Then get onto them through outreach to list authors, digital PR, review-site profiles and genuine participation in communities. This is the off-site half of inbound that most content teams skip.
Inbound compounds slowly. Google PPC on high-intent terms captures demand while content builds, and search term reports show you which queries actually convert, which tells your content team what to write next.
Sessions are a weak signal when answers happen off-site. Track pipeline and revenue from organic and AI referrals, segment chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com referrals in GA4, monitor how often you’re named for priority prompts, and add a free-text “how did you hear about us” field to every form. Google’s generative AI performance report in Search Console, rolled out to all sites on August 31, 2026, adds impressions data for AI Overviews and AI Mode (source: Google).
A B2B SaaS company should prioritize comparison and alternatives pages, integration and use-case pages, and getting onto the software review sites and analyst-style roundups its buyers check. Its conversion point is a demo or trial, so content should answer objections about pricing, implementation and switching.
An ecommerce brand should prioritize product and collection pages that answer specific buyer criteria (“no sugar”, “for sensitive skin”, “under $50”), reviews, and placement in the “best X” articles and Reddit threads AI cites. For Buoy, an electrolyte brand, this approach made it ChatGPT’s #1 recommendation for “best electrolytes with no sweeteners” in three weeks (source: Buoy case study).
Think of inbound as the strategy and SEO, GEO and paid search as the channels that carry it. SEO gets your pages found, GEO gets your brand named in AI answers, and PPC fills the gaps while both build. Our GEO vs SEO guide explains where the tactics overlap and where they differ.
At 95 Projects, we run SEO, PPC and AI search optimization as one program for B2B, SaaS and ecommerce brands, with a senior strategist on every account. For Constant Hire, a niche recruitment agency, that work produced more than $70,000 in revenue from ChatGPT referrals within four months (source: Constant Hire case study). If you want to see how AI search is affecting your inbound pipeline, get in touch with our team.
Austin Coker is the CEO and founder of 95 Projects. He has worked in SEO since 2020, when he built and sold an ecommerce brand that grew mainly through search. He founded 95 Projects in 2022 to help SaaS, ecommerce, and B2B service companies show up wherever their buyers search, from Google to ChatGPT and AI Overviews.
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Inbound marketing means attracting customers with helpful content and experiences they’re already searching for, instead of interrupting them with ads or cold outreach. Buyers find you while researching, trust you because you helped, and contact you when they’re ready.
No, but the version built on high-volume blog traffic is fading. Buyers still research before buying. They just get more answers from AI tools, so inbound now means earning citations and recommendations in those answers, not only clicks.
The Loop is a framework HubSpot introduced in September 2025 for growth in the AI era. It has four stages: express, tailor, amplify and evolve. HubSpot says it builds on inbound’s principles rather than replacing them.
Make sure OpenAI’s search crawler can access your site, publish clear answers to buyer questions, build comparison and use-case pages, and earn mentions on the third-party pages ChatGPT cites for your category. Track your priority prompts monthly to see what’s working.
GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the work of getting your brand cited or recommended in AI-generated answers. It’s one of the channels an inbound strategy now needs, alongside SEO and paid search.
Measure pipeline and revenue rather than sessions. Track AI referral traffic in GA4, monitor how often you’re named for priority prompts, use Search Console’s generative AI report, and ask every new lead how they found you.
Bottom-of-funnel pages and AI visibility fixes can start producing leads within a few months. Broader authority work, like earning third-party mentions and building content clusters, compounds over six to twelve months. Paid search can cover the gap.
Usually, yes, if you keep it focused. Smaller companies should skip broad awareness content and put their budget into a small set of buying-intent pages, case studies and third-party mentions that drive pipeline directly.
