Answer Engine Optimization Software

AEO stands for answer engine optimization. It's the practice of improving how your brand appears in AI answers on platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and more. As more buyers turn to answer engines to research solutions, showing up accurately and prominently in those responses is becoming just as important as ranking in traditional search.

As an emerging discipline, AEO goes by many names, including AI search optimization, AI SEO, generative engine optimization (GEO), AI visibility optimization, LLM optimization (LLMO), and AI answer optimization.

Yes. You can track 25 prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini free for 28 days. No credit card required. After your 28-day trial, continue tracking for $50/month — same 25 prompts, same three engines, no interruption to your data. Learn more on our pricing page.

Prompts are the questions or queries people ask AI search. In the AEO tool, you can track specific prompts relevant to your business to see how often your brand and competitors appear in answers.

Prompt tracking helps you monitor how often your brand is mentioned — and in what context — for questions that matter to your potential buyers.

Start with the free 25 prompts during the 28-day trial. Most teams expand their prompt set over time to track more of the prompts that matter to their business. You can purchase additional prompts at any time — there’s no limit to how many you can add.

• Answer engine: An AI tool that responds to questions with direct answers rather than a list of links. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are answer engines.

• Brand visibility score: How often your brand appears in AI answers across your tracked prompts, expressed as a percentage.

• Competitor visibility: Measures how often each tracked brand appears in AI-generated answers over time. It’s calculated as a brand’s visibility divided by the total number of answers analyzed.

• Share of voice: How often your brand is mentioned compared to competitors across the same prompts.

• Sentiment analysis: Whether AI is describing your brand positively, negatively, or neutrally when it mentions you, measured on a scale from -100 to +100.

• AI search: A common term for the same channel AEO addresses. You may also see generative engine optimization (GEO), AI visibility optimization, or LLM optimization — these all refer to the same emerging discipline.

HubSpot's AEO tool gives you four things: a visibility score, prompt tracking, citation analysis, and prioritized recommendations.

The main dashboard shows your brand visibility score, shows how that score trends over time across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and includes a competitive landscape with share of voice metrics.

Prompt tracking shows you how visible your business is at the individual prompt level and the exact response ChatGPT, Gemini, and/or Perplexity returned. You can filter by answer engine, buyer's journey phase, product/service relevance, and more.

Citations analysis breaks down which domains and content types are driving AI mentions for your brand and your competitors. Source types include owned content, competitor domains, social platforms, user-generated content, and more.

Recommendations turn all of that data into prioritized actions based on your visibility gaps — like creating a new blog post, updating an existing page, publishing a LinkedIn post, or reaching out to third-party sites.

Citation analysis shows you exactly which domains, pages, and content types are being referenced in AI answers. You can see how your citation rate compares to competitors over time, which source types (owned, competitor, third-party, social, affiliate, and more) and content types (blog, news, product, social, and more) are driving AI mentions, and which specific pages are being cited most often.

When you understand what's driving AI answers, you know exactly what to create, update, or optimize.

No. HubSpot's AEO tool is built so any marketer can get started and find actionable insights quickly, without needing technical knowledge or AEO expertise.

HubSpot has navigated every major shift in how buyers find products — and helped hundreds of thousands of businesses do the same.

• 2006: Proved that inbound marketing worked before anyone called it a strategy

• 2013: Made SEO native to marketing when it was still locked inside technical teams

• 2026: Acquired XFunnel, ran AEO on our own brand, and built the tools based on what actually works

Every time the discovery channel has shifted, HubSpot has been there first.

These tools and resources serve different stages of the AEO journey — from a quick one-time check to deep, ongoing optimization.

AEO Grader — A free, one-time diagnostic. Enter a brand name and get a snapshot of your visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini: visibility score, sentiment, competitive positioning, and a sample of recommendations. Runs pre-set queries on your behalf – ChatGPT and Gemini pull from training data; Perplexity from live search. A good starting point, but a single moment in time.

AI Search Sensor — A free, continuous tracker of industry-wide AEO shifts. Tracks AI visibility trends across major players and industries. AI Search Sensor won’t show your brand’s visibility, but HubSpot AEO can.

HubSpot AEO — The best way to get started with tracking and improving your brand's visibility in AI-generated answers. Available at $50/mo ($45 when paid yearly), with no additional HubSpot subscription required. Includes prompt tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, brand visibility and citation analysis, competitor share of voice, and prioritized recommendations for what to do next.