On June 22, 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire.

Not a small fire. Not the first fire, either. The river had burned at least a dozen times since 1868.

But this fire was different. It made Time magazine. It sparked outrage. It became the catalyst for the Clean Water Act of 1972.

The river burned because we filled it with garbage. Oil slicks, industrial waste, debris so thick that it could catch fire from a spark. We knew it was polluted. We just kept dumping.

Today, the river of business communications is on fire.

Email inboxes. Search results. LinkedIn feeds.

Every channel we depend on to reach buyers is burning.

And just like the Cuyahoga in 1969, it’s burning because we polluted it.

The difference? We’re still dumping.

The Channels Are Turning to Ash

Without drama, let’s start with what’s actually happening. The data is as stark as it is unambiguous.

Every major channel you’re using to reach buyers is in flames.

• E-mail is dying in plain sight. If you’re sending to Office365, only one-in-two emails now reaches the inbox. That’s not a typo. Inbox placement dropped from 77% to 51% in a single year. For Outlook? Seven-in-ten emails are filtered away before anyone sees them.
• High-volume senders got hit hardest. If you’re sending a million emails a month, your inbox placement crashed from 50% to 28%. You’re spending the same money to reach half as many people, and most of what gets through lands in spam.
• The problem isn’t your content. It’s not your subject lines. Microsoft and Google have made a decision: they’re going to filter aggressively, and they don’t care if your email is ‘legitimate.’ They care about engagement rates, authentication protocols, and sender reputation. And if you’re a B2SMB company trying to prospect at scale, you’re fighting an algorithm that assumes you’re spam.
• Search is no better. 73% of B2B websites lost significant organic traffic between 2024 and 2025. The average decline across all B2B websites was 34%. Even if you rank in the top three positions, you’re getting less than half the clicks you used to. Why? Because 60% of searches now end without any click. Google answers the question with an AI Overview, a Featured Snippet, or a direct answer box. Your website never gets seen.
• Paid Traffic is cratering. Salesforce paid traffic is down 79%. And if you thought organic search was a safe haven? HubSpot lost 70-80% of its organic traffic in three months. These aren’t small companies with bad SEO strategies. These are category leaders with massive content libraries, and they’re watching their traffic evaporate.
• Yes, of course AI is having an impact. The buyers you’re trying to reach? They’re not “searching” anymore. 67% of B2B decision-makers now use ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity to do their initial research. That number was 12% two years ago. By 2027, 95% of B2B decision-makers will start their research with AI. They’re not clicking through to your website. They’re getting their answers in a chat window.
• LinkedIn engagement is sliding too. Down 8.3% in the first half of 2025. If you’ve built a large following, congratulations: the algorithm punishes you for it. Large accounts get three impressions per follower. Small accounts get 16. The more you’ve invested in building your audience, the less LinkedIn shows your content to them.

Every channel is failing. Email. Search. Social.

These aren’t temporary dips. These are structural collapses.

The B2SMB Go-to-Market Crisis

The channels are burning, but there is no fire sale from the channels.

Your go-to-market costs are exploding.

In the last 18 months, sales and marketing effectiveness has been cut in half.

The median Sales & Marketing multiple dropped from 6x in 2024 to 3x in 2025.

Translation: you’re generating half the revenue you were with the same marketing budget. Top performers fell from 22x to 7x. One-third of previous efficiency. Gone.

This isn’t about your team’s execution. This isn’t about your messaging. The channels themselves now require twice the spend to deliver the same results. The river is so polluted that it takes twice as much effort to reach anyone.

Customer acquisition costs have increased 222% over the last eight years.

In 2024 alone, CAC jumped 14%. The median company now spends $2 to acquire $1 of annual recurring revenue. Bottom-quartile companies spend $2.82 per dollar.

The math doesn’t work. There is no sustainable business spending two dollars to make one.

HubSpot – whose content is in my opinion best-in-class – used to get the majority of its pipeline from blog traffic. Now it’s 10%.

The inbound marketing model that powered a generation of B2SMB growth is effectively gone.

The stock market sees it.

HubSpot shares down 51% in calendar 2025. Monday.com down 36%. Salesforce down 31%. These companies aren’t failing because of bad products. The market is repricing them because it sees what they see: the GTM channels are on fire. You can’t build a go-to-market model when email gets filtered to spam, search traffic collapses 34%, and your LinkedIn posts reach three people. The infrastructure itself is collapsing.

Everyone is spending more to reach fewer people, and the people you do reach are less likely to convert because they’re drowning in noise.

That’s not a strategy. That’s a death spiral.

Who Set This Fire?

The Cuyahoga didn’t catch fire on its own. Factories dumped waste. Oil companies dumped sludge. Ships dumped garbage. A few big polluters created most of the problem.

The same is true for business communications.

We like to blame ‘the algorithm’ or ‘AI’ for the collapse. But AI didn’t pollute the river. We did.

• 75% percent of marketers are using AI tools to generate content.
• 54%t of sales teams are using AI to write personalized outbound emails.
• 63% of content creators are using AI-assisted scriptwriting.
• 42% of YouTube creators are using AI to generate thumbnails.
• 74% of new web pages now contain AI-generated content.
• Over half of ALL articles are primarily AI-written.

Does anyone want to hit Polymarket and bet if any one of these numbers will stop growing?

The internet is drowning in content, and we’re the ones flooding it.

AI doesn’t produce worse content than humans – it produces infinitely MORE of it.

And we’re happy to apply the “more is more” playbook.

When marketers can generate 50 blog posts in the time it used to take to write one, that stuff is going somewhere. The river overflows is choked. The channels aren’t collapsing because AI content is bad. They’re collapsing because there’s too much of everything.

This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a behavioral problem. AI tools aren’t inherently bad. But when three-quarters of marketers use them to flood every channel with more content, more emails, more posts, the flow slows to a crawl.

Meanwhile, like any pollution crisis, the problems accelerate to a tipping point. The Cuyahoga didn’t catch fire because of one factory’s waste. It caught fire because decades of accumulated pollution from hundreds of sources finally reached critical mass. One spark, and the whole river ignited.

That’s where we are now. The river is burning.

It’s not a few bad actors flooding the channels. It’s all of us. Every marketer with a ChatGPT subscription writing five emails instead of one. Every sales person using AI to personalize a thousand prospecting messages. Every LinkedIn poster using Claude to polish their hot take. All of us, armed with tools that let us produce ten times the content in the same amount of time.

The channels weren’t built for this volume. And frankly, nor were we.

WE can’t handle it. We can’t read a thousand emails! We can’t evaluate 50 search results! We can’t process 500 LinkedIn posts! So the platforms filter for us – aggressively. Microsoft sends half your emails to spam because users are drowning. Google answers questions with AI Overviews because people can’t wade through pages of content anymore. LinkedIn shows your post to three people because the feed is overflowing.

The more we pollute, the more they filter. It’s a feedback loop that accelerates the collapse.

The people trying to do good work are burning out. 52% of content creators experienced burnout as a direct result of their career. A study in Australia found 70% of marketing professionals there reported burnout in the past year. Do you think that’s isolated to Australia?

We’re all exhausted from trying to cut through the noise while the noise keeps getting louder.

What the Clean Water Act Actually Did

The fire in the Cuyahoga had two positive outcomes: the establishment of our national EPA, and The Clean Water Act.

Both combined to manifest our own national awakening that burning rivers were bad, putting into motion profound change.

The new entity and legislation didn’t just regulate riverside factories. Both put a good deal of blame back on us. Both fundamentally changed how we thought about shared resources. Both declared that you couldn’t dump waste into a river just because it was convenient, whether from an 8-foot wide pipe or from the back of a pick-up truck. It held ALL polluters accountable.

And neither EPA nor CWA blamed the river.

It worked because it recognized a simple truth: when everyone pollutes, no one benefits. The river becomes unusable. The fish die. The ecosystem collapses. And eventually, even the polluters suffer because they’ve destroyed the resource they depend on.

We’re at that point with business communications.

Our river is on fire. And we’re the ones who lit the match.

What Comes Next

There is no Clean Water Act coming for business communications. No regulatory body is going to save us. The EPA isn’t showing up to shut down your marketing automation platform.

Which means we have two choices.

The first is to keep doing what we’re doing. Keep sending those emails, publishing the blog posts, posting on LinkedIn. Follow the gurus and throw in some carousels and infographics. Keep buying the AI tools that promise to 10x your output. Keep spending more for diminishing returns while telling ourselves the channels will bounce back, or that we’ll “figure it out.”

The stock market has already told you how that ends. HubSpot down 51%. Monday.com down 36%. Salesforce down 31%. The market is pricing in the death of this GTM model.

The second choice is harder. It requires admitting that the B2SMB go-to-market playbook that worked for the last decade is dead.

That you can’t scale your way to growth anymore. That volume isn’t the answer when volume is the problem. That if the metrics aren’t working we can just measure harder.

It means building differently. Smaller. More deliberate. Focusing on relationships instead of reach. Signal instead of noise. Quality instead of quantity. Communities instead of campaigns.

It means accepting that your CAC is going to stay high and your organic leads are going to stay low until the ecosystem is somehow cleansed, even purged and dredged.

It means recognizing that AI isn’t the enemy – our behavior with AI is.

The tools amplified what we were already doing wrong. They just let us do it at scale fast enough to break everything.

The Cuyahoga caught fire thirteen times before we finally did something about it. Thirteen times we watched it burn and then went back to dumping.

The river of business communications is burning now.

How much longer are we going to watch it burn before we stop dumping?

Dear Reader:

On February 22 the B2SMB Institutewill celebrate its 8th Anniversary.

Our mission and our heritage since our launch has been centered on a simple premise: that we solve problems better together.

B2SMB Leaders in this highly fragmented $2.5Tril Small Business Marketplace are themselves fragmented. Peers don’t talk to peers.

Ironic, because the very best solution I’ve found over 40+ years in business have come from my peers.

During Covid, the Institute exploded, because the value proposition of our network of B2SMB Leaders was painfully clear. We needed each other. We doubled in size.

But I fear the noise – and the burning river – are now smothering our demand for each other.

Maybe I too easily draw parallels between our Covid era and now. But I know that the very real and painful conversations I’ve had with many of you over the last few months have felt the same.

“How’s business?”

“It’s like somebody shut off the water main.”

“Yeah, my e-mails are cratering.”

“So are mine. And I can’t buy traffic. Or leads. Or sales. I’m more embarrassed every day. I’m supposed to be the smart one.”

“Well, the good news is you’re not alone. At least we have each other.”