Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of helping your brand show up inside AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. Instead of chasing blue links alone, you track when AI actually mentions and cites your organization in its responses.
Traditionally, SEO asked, “What rank did we get on this results page?” AEO changes the unit of measurement. In an AI answer, there is just one synthesized response and a short list of sources. Either your organization is included, or you’re invisible at the moment the buyer makes a decision.
HubSpot’s AEO tool gives you a dedicated dashboard to monitor that visibility. It shows which prompts trigger AI answers that mention you, where those citations come from on your site, and how your share of voice compares to competitors in your space.
For example, HubSpot’s own resources describe AI visibility in terms of visibility rate, citation count, and share of voice — the percentage of relevant AI answers where your brand is mentioned versus others. Those are exactly the concepts you see reflected in the AEO interface.
If you lead marketing, business retention, or investment attraction, this matters because more of your prospects are asking AI things like, “Which CRM is best for economic development organizations?” or “Where can I find premium bagels near me?” AEO is how you ensure those answers increasingly point back to you.
To access HubSpot AEO, navigate to the left-side navigation in your HubSpot portal and look for the AEO item in the menu. Today, it’s still labeled as a beta feature, so load times can be a little slow, just like Jackson Wengler mentions in the walkthrough.
When you open AEO for the first time, HubSpot prompts you to enter your brand name and primary domain. This step tells the system which organization it should look for in AI answers and which website to treat as your main source of truth.
You’ll also see options for brand name variations and basic business classification. For instance, you can specify whether you primarily serve consumers or other businesses. In the demo video, the example account is a B2C brand called “Everything Bagel,” so the choice is set to consumers.
After you click to get started, HubSpot begins scanning and researching your industry landscape. Expect a short wait of a minute or two while it pulls context about your space, competitors, and common prompts. Because this is still beta, you might see the occasional loading delay or hiccup; that’s normal and usually resolves by simply waiting or refreshing.
This initial setup is crucial. It anchors AEO around your real brand and domain so future data—prompts, AI answers, citations, and share of voice—accurately reflect how AI tools are representing your organization, not just generic topics.
Once the basic brand profile is in place, HubSpot AEO automatically suggests competitors based on your industry and domain. In the “Everything Bagel” example, the tool surfaces other bagel shops and related businesses. You can scan that list, confirm which ones are truly competitors, and add more manually if any are missing.
This competitor step powers one of the most useful metrics in the dashboard: share of voice. If “New York Bagels” holds 57% of the share of voice for key prompts, while your brand is only at 10%, you immediately see how much room there is to grow.
Next, you can define your products or services. In the video, a simple product entry—“bagel”—is added. In your own account, you might add “economic development CRM,” “BRE survey program,” or “downtown revitalization strategy workshop.” Each product helps AEO understand which kinds of prompts and answers are most relevant to the outcomes you care about.
You can also add your ideal customer profiles (ICPs). These might be “regional economic development organizations,” “small downtown development authorities,” or “multi-location food retailers.” HubSpot lets you create and expand this list so the prompts and recommendations map to your real-world targets.
Taking a few extra minutes here pays off. The more precisely you define competitors, products, and ICPs, the more accurately AEO mirrors your actual market landscape—and the more actionable the prompts and share-of-voice data become.
After setup, HubSpot AEO generates a set of sample prompts that your customers or stakeholders might realistically ask in AI tools. In the bagel example, one of those prompts is, “What makes premium bagels better?” For an economic development team, you might see prompts like, “How do cities track business retention?” or “What is the best CRM for economic development?”.
For each prompt, AEO looks at how AI engines answer the question today and whether your brand shows up. If your site includes clear, high-quality content that directly addresses that question, there’s a much better chance AI will pull a quote, statement, or recommendation from your pages.
Inside the dashboard, you’ll see three linked concepts:
If, for example, you’ve written a detailed article explaining “what makes premium bagels better” and optimized it for clarity, structure, and trust, AIs are more likely to cite your site when answering that question. Over time, as you improve content around these prompts, you should see more prompts where your domain appears in the citation column.
This prompt-level view is one of the clearest bridges between what’s on your website today and how AI answers tomorrow.
Once data starts flowing, the AEO dashboard becomes your command center. At a glance, you can see which prompts matter, whether AI mentions you, and how your visibility compares to competitors over time.
Key areas include:
The interface behaves a lot like other HubSpot objects you already know. You can sort, filter, and even save custom views the way you would for companies, contacts, deals, or tickets. For example, you could filter prompts by a specific ICP or product line to see how well you’re represented for that segment alone.
The value of HubSpot AEO comes from what you do with the insights. Each prompt without a citation is a content opportunity. Each competitor that outranks you on share of voice is a signal to study what they publish and raise your own standard.
Start with prompts where you currently have zero or low visibility but clear commercial relevance—questions that serious buyers or stakeholders actually ask. For a food brand, that might be “best gluten-free bagels in [city].” For an economic development agency, it could be “how cities support existing businesses after a disaster.”
For each priority prompt, create or improve a page that:
Resources like HubSpot’s AI visibility template and product page for AEO (AI Visibility | HubSpot AEO; How to track your brand’s presence in AI search) can guide how you structure these answers.
Finally, revisit your AEO dashboard regularly. Treat it as a living scorecard: track your visibility rate, watch shifts in citation patterns, and aim to steadily grow your share of voice. As you do, you’ll help ensure that when people ask AI the questions that matter most, your organization is part of the answer.