Sometime in late 2024, marketing teams across venture-backed B2B started seeing the same chart. Organic traffic that had climbed steadily through 2023 was peaking, then declining. By the spring of 2025, the conversation in marketing leadership circles had shifted. The question was no longer how much AI content to ship. It was why the AI content already shipped was no longer ranking. Two years of budgets pointed at AI content tooling had pushed martech to roughly 22 percent of marketing spend, per Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey, with generative AI tooling driving the growth. The organic traffic those investments were supposed to deliver kept falling.
The pressure was concentrated by Google’s March 2024 core update, which folded the company’s helpful-content signals directly into its main ranking algorithm. The rollout took an unusually long 45 days and removed an estimated 45 percent of low-quality, unoriginal content from search results. “A lot of affected site owners probably thought they were doing everything right because Google was rewarding them with traffic,” Lily Ray, an SEO analyst who tracked the affected sites for months, said at the time. Ray’s tracking surfaced a recurring pattern across the worst-hit sites: AI content published at scale with minimal editorial oversight.
