BetaSet up and analyze AEO

Measure how a brand appears in AI-powered search results using Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). After confirming brand details, such as the ideal customer profile or products and services, prompts are tracked on an ongoing basis to evaluate brand visibility across supported AI engines.

AEO runs your prompts daily against AI engines (e.g., ChatGPT), then aggregates results into visibility metrics. These metrics support analysis of brand mentions, prompt coverage, and citation patterns over time.

Please note: Please avoid sharing any sensitive information in your enabled data inputs for AI features, including your prompts. Admins can configure generative AI features in account management settings. For information on how HubSpot AI uses your data to provide trustworthy AI, with you in control of your data, you can refer to our HubSpot AI Trust FAQs.

Before you get started

Before you set up and analyze AEO, know how it is measured, what prompts and citations are, and how they are defined.

Understand brand visibility and prompts

• Brand visibility is how often your brand is mentioned among the prompts you track. Additionally, it represents how AI engines understand your brand through public information on the web.
• Brand visibility is analyzed on:
  
  • Prompt coverage: the percentage of prompts where your brand appears at least once.
  • Frequency across AI engines: whether your brand shows up consistently across different AI engines.
  • Relative competitor presence: how often competitors appear in the same prompt results.
• Prompts are questions visitors might ask AI engines (e.g., Gemini) when looking for brands or products.

Understand citations

• Citations show which websites various AI engines refer to when creating responses for your tracked prompts. A citation is recorded when and AI engine includes or references:
  • A link to a webpage.
  • A domain name embedded in its answer.
• Citations don't count as mentions of your brand name.

Set up AEO

Set up AEO for the first time by confirming your brand details and adding prompts. 

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Content > Search Strategy.
2. Click the AEO tab.
3. Click Get started.
4. In the dialog box, enter your brand name in the Brand field (e.g., AcmeDemo).
5. Enter your domain in the Domain field (e.g., acme-demo.test).
6. Enter your brand name variations in the Add brand variations field. Separate each variation with a comma (e.g., AcmeDemo, Acme Demo).

7. When finished confirming your brand details, click Confirm and generate prompts. You'll be directed to add prompts.

Add prompts

After you've confirmed your brand details, a set of suggested prompts will be generated. The prompts generated are based on your brand identity details you provided in your AI settings. Learn more about managing AI settings.

1. By default, all prompts are selected. To remove a prompt, clear the checkbox next to a prompt.
2. To refresh or add more prompts, click the More actions dropdown menu and select an option in the top right:
   • Refresh all prompts: new prompts will be generated.
   • Add more suggested prompts: an additional 8–15 suggested prompts will be generated.
3. To manually add a prompt, click Manually add prompts then enter the prompt details.
4. When finished, click Add [#] selected prompts. You'll be directed to analyze your brand visibility.

Analyze the AEO dashboard

Use the Dashboard tab to analyze your AEO performance, including brand visibility, prompts, domains, citations, and competitor benchmarks. You can also manage competitors directly from the dashboard settings.

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Content > Search Strategy.
2. Click the AEO tab.
3. Click the Dashboard tab.
4. To filter the dashboard, click Filters in the top right.
5. In the right panel, choose your filter options:
   • Date: click the date picker to select a date range.
   • Engine: click the Engine dropdown menu to select an AI engine. To remove an AI engine, clear the checkbox.
   • Group: click the Group dropdown menu and select a group.
6. When finished, click Apply. 

Analyze brand visibility

• Brand visibility: displays a percentage score on how often your brand appears in AI-powered search results across tracked prompts.

• Brand visibility over time: displays how your brand visibility score changes over time.

Analyze competitor performance

• Share of Voice: the proportion of total brand mentions that belong to your brand across tracked prompts. This metric is calculated by dividing your brand's mentions by the total number of brand mentions from all competitors for the tracked prompts.
• Competitor Visibility: compares your brand identity to your competitors.

Analyze citations and domains

• Top domains: displays websites that AI engines most often cite across your tracked prompts. If you click this report, you'll be directed to the Citations tab. 
• Citations by channel: displays the channels of all citations for your tracked prompts.
• Citations with brand mention rate: displays the percentage of sources cited by answer engines that mention your brand.

Manage competitors

AEO identifies relevant competitors and tracks how your visibility performs against them. Manage competitors from the AEO dashboard settings.

1. On the Dashboard tab, click the Settings icon and select Edit competitors.

2. To add a competitor, click Add more competitors. In the right panel, enter the competitor details, then click Add competitor.
3. To edit a competitor, click the competitor's name. 
4. To delete competitors, select the checkboxes next to each competitor and click Delete [#] selected. 

Analyze and manage prompts

Analyze prompts to understand how customers ask AI engines about solutions like yours. HubSpot analyzes these prompts to confirm if your brand appears and which competitors are mentioned. Prompts are generated using your HubSpot data, audience, and offerings. Update this information in your Brand settings.

Add and remove prompts on the Prompts tab. Prompt usage limits vary by subscription:

• Marketing Hub or Content Hub Professional: up to 50 prompts.

• Marketing Hub or Content Hub Enterprise: up to 100 prompts.

Analyze prompts

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Content > Search Strategy.
2. Click the AEO tab.
3. Click the Prompts tab.
4. To filter the prompts, click Filters in the top right.
5. In the right panel, choose your filter options:
   • Date: click the date picker to select a date range.
   • Engine: click the Engine dropdown menu to select an AI engine. To remove an AI engine, clear the checkbox. 
   • Group: click the Group dropdown menu and select a group. 
6. When finished, click Apply.
7. At the top of the view, review your prompt metrics including Total prompts, Average visibility, and Total responses, and Total citations. To hide metrics, click Hide metrics on the top right.

Understand the buyer journey stage

Each prompt is assigned a single buyer journey stage based on its intent. This classification helps interpret visibility metrics within the correct context.

The four Buyer Journey stages are:

• Awareness: broad, unbranded, problem-based queries where brand mentions are typically lower.
• Consideration: unbranded queries where users compare available solutions.
• Evaluation: branded comparisons that explicitly name your company or competitors.
• Decision: high-intent queries focused on determining whether a specific product or company meets defined needs or features.

A prompt can only be associated with one Buyer Journey stage. This ensures reporting and visibility metrics are interpreted consistently. Changing the stage isn't recommended.

Manage prompts

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Content > Search Strategy.
2. Click the AEO tab.
3. Click the Prompts tab.
4. To add a new prompt, click the Add prompts dropdown menu and select Manually add prompts on the top right.
5. To associate the prompt with an existing topic:
   • Select the checkbox next to each prompt you want to associate.
   • Click Add topic at the top of the table.
   • In the dialog box, click the Select topic dropdown menu and select a topic.
   • When finished, click Add topic.
6. To view details for a specific prompt, click the prompt.
   • In the right panel, click the date picker field and select a date range.
   • Click an AI engine tab (e.g., ChatGPT) to view the results from the run with your tracked prompt.
7. To remove prompts, select the checkbox next to each prompt you want to remove and then click Delete. In the dialog box, click Confirm.

Analyze citations

Analyze citations to understand which websites AI engines reference, how authoritative your content appears, and whether third-party sources influence your brand’s visibility. Use this information to decide if you should update or create new content.

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Content > Search Strategy.
2. Click the AEO tab.
3. Click the Citations tab.
4. To filter citations, click Filters in the top right.
5. In the right panel, choose your filter options:
   • Date: click the date picker to select a date range.
   • Engine: click the Engine dropdown menu to select an AI engine. To remove an AI engine, clear the checkbox.
   • Group: click the Group dropdown menu and select a group.
6. When finished, click Apply.

Owned domain citation rate vs. competitors

Use the Owned domain citation rate vs. competitors report to compare how often AI engines cite content from your website versus competitor domains across your tracked prompts. 

A higher share of owned citations means AI engines rely more on content you control when generating responses. This gives you more influence over how your brand is represented in AI engines. 

Review this report to:

• Find trends in how often your owned content is cited over time.

• Compare your citation share against competitors for the same prompt.
• Find potential gaps where competitors are cited more often. This may show opportunities to improve the clarity, coverage, or relevance of your content.

If no data is shown, no citations were detected for the selected time range.

Citations with brand mention rate vs. competitors 

Use the Citations with brand mention rate vs. competitors report to understand how often your brand is referenced in citations, regardless of where the cited content originates. 

This report includes citations from third-party sources such as reviews, news articles, and industry publications. Even if AI engines don't cite your website directly, they may still reference your brand through external sources. 

Review this report to:

• Evaluate overall brand visibility in AI engine responses. 

• Track changes in influence over time. 
• Find when competitors are becoming more prominent for the same topics. 

Citations by content type

Use the Citations by content type report to understand which content formats AI engines most often reference for your tracked prompts. 

Content types include:

Review this report to:

• Find out which content formats AI engines prefer for your topic area.

• Find gaps where AI engines cite formats you don't produce. 
• Prioritize creating or updating content formats that are more likely to earn citations.

Citations by channel

Use the Citations by channel report to view what types of websites AI engines reference when generating responses. 

Source types include:

Review this report to:

• Understand how much of your AI visibility comes from content you control versus external sources.

• Find reliance on third-party validation such as earned or peer sources.
• Track growth in user-generated or social sources, which may show increased awareness or discussion.

Review additional citation reports

In addition to the above citation charts, review the following reports for insight into how AI engines reference your content and external sources:

• Top owned citations: lists the pages on your domain that AI engines reference most often. This helps you understand which content AI engines consider most authoritative for your brand.
• Top citations overall: lists the websites that appear most often across all citations for your tracked prompts. This helps you understand which third-party sources most influence how AI engines describe your brand.

Use recommendations

Use the Recommendations tab to identify actions that may improve how often your brand is cited in AI engines. Recommendations are based on citation patterns observed across your tracked prompts. 

Recommendations focus on the types of sources, formats, and themes that AI engines consistently reference when generating responses.

Understand how recommendations are generated

For each tracked prompt, AEO analyzes AI responses and extracts all cited sources. Then AEO looks at patterns in those citations to find the structural and content signals most often linked to a citation.

Pattern analysis includes:

• Frequently cited domains

• Common content formats (e.g., blog posts)

• Recurring themes and keywords

• Competitor presence

Recommendations are generated directly from these observed patterns and reflect what AI engines consistently reference for your tracked prompts.

View and manage recommendations

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Content > Search Strategy.
2. Click the AEO tab.
3. Click the Recommendations tab.
4. On the Recommendations tab, click a recommended action.
5. In the right panel, view the recommendation details:
   • Suggested content: the suggested content to create. This includes the title, summary, target audience, and suggested keywords to use. 
   • What's driving this recommendation: the analysis that was completed on your citations for tracked prompts. This includes associated prompts, content type distribution, and top citations identified.
6. To change the status of a recommendation, click the Change status dropdown menu and select a status (e.g., Mark as In Progress). 
7. To change the status of multiple recommendations, select the checkbox next to each recommendation. Then click the Change status dropdown menu and select a status (e.g., Dismiss). 

Generate a blog post from a recommendation

For recommendations with a Content Type of Listicle, generate a blog post directly from the recommendation. 

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Content > Search Strategy.
2. Click the AEO tab.
3. Click the Recommendations tab.
4. On the Recommendations tab, click a recommendation with a Content Type of Listicle.
5. In the right panel, click Create blog post.
6. In the dialog box, select the blog where the blog post should be created.
7. Click Generate blog post. You'll be directed to the content editor.
8. In the content editor, review the generated content and customize the blog post as needed.
9. When finished, click Publish in the top right.