A marketing leader asks their team a simple question in a meeting: "How are people finding us using AI tools like ChatGPT?"
The room goes quiet.
Someone pulls up Google Analytics.
Someone else opens their traffic report in SEMrush.
Neither has the answer, because neither tool was built to answer it.
The way people search is changing quickly. A recent study found that 37% of consumers now start their searches with AI instead of Google. AI is reshaping how your buyers find you, and most marketing teams have no way to measure it.
That gap is the reason HubSpot AEO exists.
After being announced at Inbound 2025, the public beta was fully rolled out during the Spring 2026 Spotlight.
HubSpot AEO gives marketing teams a real way to measure how their brand shows up in answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
If you use HubSpot and haven't looked at it yet, it's worth checking out. Below, we'll cover what it does, how it works, and how to get real value out of it.
For the last two decades, the goal for marketers was simple: rank on page one of Google. Write good content, build backlinks, increase domain authority, and drive inbound leads.
While that playbook hasn’t gone away entirely, it's shrinking.
HubSpot reports that organic traffic for its customers is down 27% year over year, while AI-referred traffic has grown significantly.
Buyers are increasingly starting their research in tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, where they get a natural language answer to their question instead of a list of links.
This is where Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) comes in.
AEO is the practice of optimizing how your brand appears in AI-generated answers. Instead of ranking a page, the goal is to get cited inside the response. Instead of tracking keyword positions, you're tracking brand mentions, share of voice, and which sources AI is pulling from.
SEO and AEO aren't in opposition. Teams that do both well are the ones winning right now.
But they're different disciplines, with different metrics, and until recently, most marketing teams had no tool to measure the AEO side at all.
HubSpot AEO is organized into four tabs, each covering a different layer of how your brand performs in AI search.
The Dashboard is your high-level scorecard that tracks how your brand appears across AI-responses. It surfaces the metrics most teams will review week over week to better understand your brand’s perception and presence.
Brand Visibility is a composite score that measures how often your brand appears across the prompts you track. It factors in prompt coverage (the percentage of prompts where your brand shows up at least once), consistency across answer engines, and how often competitors appear in the same results. The score is broken out by engine (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) and tracked over time, so you can see whether you're trending up or down.
Sentiment Analysis measures whether AI is describing your brand positively, negatively, or neutrally when it does mention you, on a -100 to +100 scale. Worth checking periodically to catch negative associations early.
The Competitor Landscape section shows how you stack up against competitors. Share of Voice shows what percentage of total brand mentions in your category belong to you versus competitors. Competitor Visibility tracks how their scores are trending week over week. Together, these tell you whether you're actually gaining ground or just holding steady.
The Dashboard tab also includes a citation analysis summary: the top domains AI pulls from, citations broken out by channel, and how your brand mention rate compares to competitors across sources.
Filters across the top let you slice everything by date, engine, prompt group, product or service, ICP, or buyer journey phase, which is useful when you want to isolate performance for a specific product line or audience.
The Prompts tab is where you manage the actual questions being tracked.
You'll see your full list of prompts with a visibility score for each. Click into any prompt, and you get the real response returned by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, including how often your brand was mentioned across the multiple runs HubSpot does per engine. Each prompt also has its own Prompt Analysis and Recommendations view, so you can understand why a prompt is or isn't surfacing your brand and what to do about it.
You can add new prompts manually, generate more with Breeze AI, edit existing ones, or group them for reporting. In the top right, you'll see your prompt usage counter against your plan. Marketing Hub Pro allows you to track up to 25 prompts, while Enterprise allows up to 50.
The Citations tab is a view into what AI is actually referencing when it answers your tracked prompts.
Citation Performance vs. Competitors shows how often AI cites your domain directly versus competitor domains, and how often AI responses mention your brand across all sources, not just your own site. This matters because your AI visibility isn't just about your website. It's about whether Reddit threads, G2 reviews, industry publications, and third-party guides are mentioning you too.
Citation Composition breaks down citations by content type (blog, comparison, documentation, educational, guide) and by channel (affiliate, competitor, earned, peer, review site, user-generated content). This is how you figure out what kinds of content are actually shaping AI answers in your space.
The Overview of Top Citations section shows the top domains getting cited overall, your top owned citations (which of your pages are getting picked up), and the top URLs across the web for your tracked prompts.
The Recommendations tab is where you can turn data into action.
HubSpot takes everything it learns from your prompt tracking and citation analysis and generates a prioritized list of content recommendations. Each one is tagged with a content type (listicle, how-to, guide, product page), a content channel (blog, website, social), a priority level (high, medium, low), and the specific prompts it's meant to target.
You can update the status of each recommendation (new, in progress, dismissed), which turns the tab into something closer to a backlog your team can actually work through.
HubSpot has announced that Content Actions, a feature that lets you generate content directly inside the AEO tool, will be available starting June 2026.
If you're on Marketing Hub Pro or Enterprise, HubSpot AEO is included in your subscription at no additional cost. If you're not, you can buy it as a standalone tool for $50 per month. There's also a free 28-day trial with 10 ChatGPT prompts and no credit card required.
Additional pricing is based on answers per month. Every time HubSpot runs one of your prompts against an engine, the response counts as one answer against your monthly cap.
The allocations break down like this. Marketing Hub Pro and the standalone plan both include 25 prompts run daily across three engines, which works out to 2,500 answers per month. Marketing Hub Enterprise includes 50 prompts run daily across three engines, for 5,000 answers per month.
If you need more capacity, HubSpot sells add-on packs for $18/mo. Each pack adds 10 more prompts and 1,000 more answers per month, and they're stackable.
For most mid-market teams, the included allocation is enough to get started and see meaningful results. The conversation about add-on capacity usually comes up when a team is tracking multiple brands, product lines, or regions, or when they've matured enough in their AEO practice to want denser coverage across more specific buyer segments.
Setup is fairly quick, but the decisions you make along the way shape what the tool can actually do for you.
To set up the tool:
That's the surface-level process. The more important work is selecting the right inputs so the tool can give you the most accurate data.
This is where most teams will see the biggest differences in what the tool produces. The AEO tool pulls from context that already lives in your HubSpot account. If that context is vague or incomplete, the outputs will be too.
Before you open the AEO tool, go to your AI Settings and make sure your Data Sources are complete. This is where HubSpot stores the business context that powers most of its AI features, including AEO.
ICP provides context around your target audience. Fill this section in with details around desired job titles, industries, locations, company size, revenue range, age range, and buyer interests. If your team isn't confident in your ICP, the Breeze Marketplace has an ICP Assistant that can help you define it before setup.
Products and Services should include a clear value proposition and the specific pain points each one solves. The more specific these sections are, the more your prompts and recommendations will reflect how your actual buyers search.
This is the part most accounts have half-done or outdated. The AEO tool will run either way, but the quality of what it produces depends on what you give it.
When setting up the tool, HubSpot auto-generates a starter set of prompts for you. You'll get better results by running a separate exercise to capture how your buyers actually ask questions.
One approach we've found useful is to run a prompt-generation exercise in ChatGPT or Claude specifically to produce buyer-voice questions. Something like:
Act as a potential buyer using AI search to research solutions in this category. Generate 25 natural-language prompts that real buyers would ask across three stages of the buyer journey:
Make the prompts specific, realistic, and conversational. Focus on the kinds of questions buyers would naturally ask in tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, or other AI search experiences.
Avoid vague or overly broad prompts. Return the prompts grouped by funnel stage, and identify the top 10 highest-value prompts to track first based on buyer intent, relevance, and likelihood to influence a purchase decision.
Then cross-reference what you get with HubSpot's suggestions. You'll usually find a handful of prompts worth adding or swapping in that reflect how your buyers actually search, not how your category is typically described.
Setting the tool up is the easy part. The real work is reviewing it consistently and making decisions based on what you see. Set a starting cadence by reviewing metrics bi-weekly or monthly with your team.
Focus on Brand Visibility, Share of Voice, Sentiment, Citation Analysis, and Competitor Visibility. Each tells you something different about where you stand and where to focus next.
Review the recommendations tab on a regular cadence and add high-priority items to your content plan. None of this matters if the dashboard just sits there collecting dust. Assign someone ownership of the tool and turn insights into strategy.
HubSpot's traffic analytics now breaks out AI-referred traffic as its own source, so you can tie brand visibility to actual web traffic, contact records, and pipeline.
This is what turns AEO from a marketing metric into a business metric. You want to be able to show not just that your visibility is up, but that AI-referred visitors are arriving on your site and converting.
AI search isn't a future problem. It's changing how buyers find and evaluate your business right now.
By the time a buyer arrives on your website from an AI referral, they've already done most of their research.
They've read summaries of their options.
They've seen which brands AI considers credible in your category.
By the time someone lands on your site, they will have been closer to a decision than ever before.
And if you weren't mentioned, you weren't in the running.
Visibility in AI answers is a leading indicator of demand. Teams that start measuring and improving it now will look up in 6-12 months and find themselves in a much stronger position than teams that waited.
HubSpot AEO gives you a way to measure it. The teams that act on what they see are the ones that will benefit.
Need help implementing the AEO tool in your portal? Contact the Pros.