Your organic traffic is dropping. Buyers are skipping Google and going straight to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini to get their answers — and if your brand isn’t showing up there, you’re becoming increasingly invisible to your potential audience.
HubSpot has always been focused on marketing and has built AEO tools directly into the platform to help you proactively work to improve your AI search visibility. Let’s review what the HubSpot AEO tools do, and how to set them up and use them to track and improve your visibility in AI search.
Enter your primary brand name and any variations AI might reference — product names, abbreviated versions, common alternatives. The more complete this list, the more accurately the tool captures where you’re actually being mentioned.
Add the competitors your buyers actually compare you against. HubSpot will suggest some based on your domain, but review them. Include their domain and any name variations they use. If you're missing a key competitor, add them manually. This sets up the competitive benchmarking that runs throughout the tool.
HubSpot pulls your products and Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) from your CRM and shows them side by side. Pick one product and one ICP to generate your first set of tracking prompts. Start with your highest-value buyers or your most competitive service area.
Don’t skip the ICP location field. AI answers are increasingly personalized by geography — a buyer asking ChatGPT for recommendations in a specific city gets different results than the same question without a location attached. Accurate ICP locations mean your prompts reflect how your real buyers are actually searching.
NOTE: If you haven't had the chance to add your competitors, products, or ICPs yet? You won't hit a dead end. Inside the AEO tool, click the settings gear icon on the Prompts tab and select 'edit competitors", "View all products and services," or "View all ICPs" to add them directly from there.
HubSpot generates an initial prompt set based on your product-ICP selection. Read through each one and ask: would a real buyer actually type this into ChatGPT? Then add your own — the questions you hear on sales calls, the comparisons prospects make, the objections that come up repeatedly.
Assign each prompt a buying stage: awareness, consideration, or decision. Showing up in a decision-stage answer is far more valuable than an awareness mention, and the data will show you exactly which stage you’re winning.
Start with 20–30 prompts across two or three focus areas. A tight, focused set gives you cleaner data than spreading across every service you offer.
Data will start populating within 24–48 hours.
Once your prompts are live, the dashboard pulls everything together into a single view so you can see how your AI visibility is trending at a glance.
At the top is your Brand Visibility Score — the percentage of your tracked prompts where your brand actually appears in an AI response. Below that, a trend line shows how that number is moving over time. You’ll also see your Sentiment Score, your competitive Share of Voice, and a summary of your citation data, all in one place.
If you’ve grouped your prompts by topic or service area, you can filter the whole dashboard to isolate how you’re performing in a specific area. That’s where it gets genuinely useful — you might be strong in one area and nearly invisible in another, and the aggregate score alone would hide that.
Prompt Tracking is where you manage the specific questions you’re monitoring across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Think of it like keyword rank tracking, but for AI answers instead of a search results page.
The CRM connection is what makes the prompt tracking work particularly well inside HubSpot vs using other tools. With HubSpot CRM data we can connect the prompts that your contacts are using and connect that with who is converting. You can use your CRM data and ICPs to reverse engineer the prompts that your ideal contacts are using to find you in the AI engines.
Click into any individual prompt on the dashboard and you’ll see a full breakdown:
That last one is key. Reading the actual AI response for that prompt shows you how competitors are being described, what content is getting cited, and how the answer is framed. This is critical for your content strategy.
A citation is different from a mention. A mention is when AI names your brand. A citation is when AI actually uses your website as source material — pulling from your content to support the answer it’s giving and links back to your website.
The Citation Analysis tab shows you where your content is being pulled from and linked back to, and where it isn’t. It will include:
This is where you find out what AI is actually reading when it answers questions in your space. If your blog is being mentioned but never cited, that’s a gap. If a competitor’s article keeps showing up and yours isn’t, you know where you have some content to create.
The Sentiment Score tracks the tone AI uses when your brand comes up — positive, neutral, or negative, measured on a scale from -100 to +100. AI doesn't just list brands, it describes them. So this isn't about whether you showed up — it's about what was said when you did. Use it to catch drift after a product launch, a messaging change, or a shift in third-party coverage before it starts affecting your pipeline.
The Recommendations tab takes everything the tool has seen — your prompt data, your citation gaps, your competitor visibility — and turns it into a prioritized content action plan.
Each recommendation comes with a full brief: what to create, who it’s for, what content type to use, and why that specific piece will improve your AI visibility. If your HubSpot portal has Content Hub Pro or Enterprise, you can create a blog post directly from the AEO content recommendations and the AEO tools will draft your targeted blog posts for you.
What’s the difference between AEO and SEO?
SEO is about ranking in Google’s results. AEO is about being mentioned, cited, and recommended in AI-generated answers. They share some foundations — good content, a credible brand, consistent information across the web — but they’re measured differently and optimized differently. You need both.
Which AI platforms does HubSpot AEO track?
ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. The tool sends your tracked prompts to each platform, pulls the actual AI responses, and refreshes the data every 24 hours.
How quickly will I see results?
It depends on your existing content and SEO foundation — there's no universal timeline. The most important thing you can do is establish your baseline first so you can actually measure what's moving and when. Changes to your content and brand consistency will start to show up over time, but how quickly varies by industry, competition, and how consistently you're optimizing.
Do I need a lot of content to get started?
No. Start small and be intentional. A few meaningful, well-structured pieces — like a targeted blog post, a focused landing page, or a detailed FAQ page — will do more for your AI visibility than a large library of content. Start with what your buyers are actually asking and build from there.
What HubSpot plan do I need?
Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise — it’s already included. If you’re not on those tiers, the standalone HubSpot AEO tool is $50/month.
What’s the fastest way to see where I stand right now?
Open ChatGPT and search for your business category — think about how your ideal buyer would look you up and type that in. See who comes up. That free 60-second test will tell you more about your current AI visibility than anything else before you've spent a dollar on a tool.
Need help with setup, prompt strategy, or building your first content action plan? Reach out. Our AEO specialists are up to date with the latest tools and strategies to keep your business ahead of the competition in a quickly shifting landscape.
Not sure where you stand right now? Run an AEO Audit first — then use this guide to start moving the needle inside your portal.