HubSpot’s AEO beta is here, and we’re starting to get a real look at how brands show up in AI-powered search.
Tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity are changing how people find information. Instead of scrolling through links, users are looking for direct and accurate answers.
HubSpot’s new AEO feature is built around that shift. It’s designed to help you track where your brand appears in sampled AI responses. This includes how often you’re mentioned compared to competitors and how AI systems describe your business in those outputs. In this article, we’ll show how this works and our very early thoughts on the feature.
Like most of HubSpot’s more recent AI tools, setup is relatively simple, but how you set it up matters.
To start, go into the AEO tool (currently in beta) and begin by defining what you want to track.
First, you’ll enter your brand or domain so HubSpot knows what to analyze.
Then you’ll add any brand name variations and your business type.
You’ll then define your competitors. This gives the tool context to compare your visibility and share of voice across AI-generated responses.
You’ll then define your product/services and ICPs.
From there, you’ll add a set of target prompts or queries. These should reflect the kinds of questions your audience and customers are asking, not just high-volume keywords.
At its core, HubSpot’s AEO tool is built around how answer engines function.
They don’t rank websites the way traditional search does. Instead, they generate responses by drawing on multiple sources and deciding which information is most relevant to the question being asked.
HubSpot breaks this into a few key components.
A prompt is the question your audience is asking. This could be something like “What’s the best CRM for growing my business?” or “How do I improve lead generation for a B2B business?”
An AI answer is the response generated by the platform. This is what your audience sees and uses to evaluate their options.
A citation is the source the AI pulls from when forming its answer. This is where your content can influence what’s said.
And finally, brand visibility is how often your brand appears in those answers across the prompts you’re tracking.
Once everything is set up, HubSpot runs your prompts through AI systems and tracks what happens next.
From there, you can start to see:
Whether your brand is included in responses at all
Which prompts you show up for and which ones you don’t
How often competitors are mentioned instead of you
How AI is positioning your brand within those answers
There are a few areas of the tool that stand out.
The first is prompt-level visibility. This allows you to connect brand presence to specific questions, helping you identify gaps between what your audience is asking and where your content appears in AI-generated responses.
The second is competitive comparison. This provides context on whether you are present in responses and who is appearing in your place, which can help highlight positioning gaps.
The third is brand representation insights. In some cases, the tool can surface how AI systems describe or frame your brand in generated responses, based on the sampled outputs.
This is an early-stage feature that reflects an important shift in how visibility is being measured.
At this stage, AEO should not be viewed as a replacement for SEO or traditional performance tracking. The outputs are based on sampled prompts, AI behavior varies across platforms, and results are not exhaustive or fully standardized.
The most useful takeaway today is awareness.
Most teams still measure visibility through rankings, clicks and traffic. Meanwhile, users are increasingly relying on AI tools that bypass traditional search results entirely.
This feature helps surface early signals of how your brand may (or may not) appear in those environments.
Right now, we see AEO as:
A way to identify visibility gaps across AI-generated responses
A method for understanding competitive presence in emerging search behavior
A directional signal for how content strategy may need to evolve over time
Where it still has room to improve:
More consistency across different AI platforms and models
Stronger guidance on how to act on insights
Clearer connection between AI visibility and downstream business impact
AEO is an important shift in how marketing visibility works. Search is moving away from browsing and toward answering specific questions. And when that happens, only a handful of brands get included in the conversation.
This tool doesn’t solve that completely, but it does something most platforms haven’t been able to do.
It shows you whether you’re part of the answer. Our advice is to try it out and keep an eye out for adjustments and updates.