Organic search traffic among HubSpot customers has dropped 27% year-over-year. But HubSpot AEO beta users who are prioritizing answer engines have seen AI referral traffic grow 20% compared to customers not using the tool. On April 14, HubSpot is launching HubSpot AEO — a set of tools designed to help marketers track and improve how their brand appears in AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
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The shift in buyer behavior is already being felt across the industry. Docebo, an enterprise learning platform, now gets nearly 15% of its leads from AI traffic. Fresha, a wellness software company, is seeing more AI traffic than ever before. Both had something most marketers don’t: visibility into where their business was showing up in answer engines, and the tools to act on it.
“How buyers search is fundamentally changing,” said Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot. “They are asking questions in places like ChatGPT and Gemini, and the companies that show up in those answers are already winning. That’s exactly why we’ve built HubSpot AEO: to help businesses improve their AI visibility, grow brand awareness, and ultimately drive more qualified leads.”
What AEO is — and how it differs from SEO
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of improving how often a business appears in AI-generated answers across platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. It’s a new discipline that works differently from SEO. While SEO helps you rank in traditional search results, AEO helps you appear in answer engines, which take into account brand presence, news media, reviews, social, and owned content to decide what gets cited.
Most AEO tools make marketers start from scratch — broad categories, generic questions, prompts you’re guessing reflect how your buyers actually research.
What HubSpot’s tool does differently
HubSpot’s AEO tools are built inside Marketing Hub and pull from existing CRM data.
Two capabilities are specific to HubSpot’s implementation:
CRM-powered prompt suggestions. Rather than requiring marketers to manually construct test prompts, HubSpot generates suggestions based on what it already knows about the business and its buyer profiles.
Recommendations connected to execution. When the tool identifies a gap, marketers can act on it directly inside HubSpot by creating content, publishing social posts, or updating existing pages without switching tools.
Additional features include a brand visibility dashboard with sentiment analysis, competitor share-of-voice tracking, and citation analysis showing which sources AI is drawing from.
Early results from a customer
“With HubSpot AEO, we drove 8,000 new website visitors in just a few weeks, resulting in 12 new account conversions, which was a 10% increase year over year,” said Emily Davidson, Director of Marketing at Sandler. “The two-point lift in brand visibility increased site engagement and form fills, fueling more pipeline, while these high-intent leads are progressing faster than our typical marketing-sourced deals.”
Pricing and availability
HubSpot AEO is integrated directly in Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise. HubSpot AEO, the dedicated solution, is available for $50/month with no plan required.
