Our thinking about HubSpot, AI, & removing silo'ed data

We recently attended The Open Letter's "Building Global Tech from SA" event in Stellenbosch — a gathering of entrepreneurs, founders, and tech builders exploring how AI is fundamentally reshaping what it means to build software and scale businesses from South Africa. The lineup featured Adii Pienaar, co-founder of WooCommerce, and Renier Kriel, founder of The Open Letter and former developer. The conversation was sharp, practical, and deeply relevant to what we're seeing every day at MO Agency: the cost of building has collapsed, the barrier to entry has evaporated, and

At some point in the last year, SEO quietly split into two conversations. One group is still arguing about rankings, backlinks, and domain authority. The other group is asking a different question entirely: “Why does this article keep getting cited by ChatGPT?” That second question is where things start to get interesting. Because what we’re seeing now isn’t the death of SEO — it’s a shift in what matters most. First, let’s clear up the terminology mess Depending on who you ask, this new thing is

Once you accept that discovery is happening inside AI tools – AI is changing search from clicks to answers – an uncomfortable question follows pretty quickly: How do you even know if your brand is showing up there? With Google, we had dashboards. Rankings. Impressions. Clicks. Search Console. Ahrefs. SEMrush. With AI? It mostly feels like shouting into a

Every time there’s a big shift in digital marketing, someone declares something “dead”. SEO is dead. Email is dead. Websites are dead. Now apparently, inbound is dead too. It isn’t. But if you’re still thinking about inbound the way we did five or ten years ago, then yes — that version of the funnel is broken. Not subtly. Structurally. The inbound funnel we all grew up with For a long time, inbound worked beautifully because the system was stable. The model looked something like this:

If you’ve noticed your organic traffic dipping over the last few months, you’re not imagining it. And no, it’s not because your SEO team suddenly forgot how to do SEO. Something bigger is happening: search is shifting from clicks to answers. People are getting what they need inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity (and whatever else pops up next), without ever visiting your website. That sounds dramatic, but it’s already playing out in real data - including ours. There is, however, a silver lining to the drop.