HubSpot Tools

AEO Grader

HubSpot's free Answer Engine Optimization Grader reveals how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini characterize your brand based on their training data. Get a detailed brand perception analysis across five dimensions with written interpretation of your results.

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Measure How Answer Engines Represent Your Brand

Answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini have fundamentally changed how buyers research brands. When a prospect asks an answer engine "what's the best CRM software" or "is [Your Brand] trustworthy," they receive a synthesized response – often without clicking through to a single website. This is the zero-click funnel: answer engines act as the first and sometimes only touchpoint between your brand and a potential customer.

Measuring brand visibility in AI is now a prerequisite for any effective marketing strategy. Traditional SEO metrics like traffic and click-through rates don't reflect how answer engines represent your brand in generated responses. HubSpot's AEO Grader is a brand visibility measurement tool built specifically for this environment. The tool evaluates your brand across five scored dimensions – sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice, and market position. 

Don't let answer engines define your brand narrative without your input. Use HubSpot's free AEO Grader to understand how leading answer engines represent your business today. When you're ready to track how that changes over time, HubSpot AEO monitors your brand continuously across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.

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AEO Analytics: What You Get in Your Brand Report

HubSpot's AEO Grader evaluates your brand across five dimensions, each contributing to your overall score out of 100.

1. Sentiment Analysis (up to 40 points)

The tool's highest-weighted dimension assesses the overall tone answer engines use when characterizing your brand. Scoring covers three layers:

  • General sentiment: The overall positive, negative, or neutral tone of AI descriptions
  • Contextual sentiment: How sentiment varies across different topics and use cases (e.g., customer support vs. product innovation)
  • Source-based sentiment: The credibility and reliability of sources influencing how AI represents your brand

Positive indicators include phrases like "praised for intuitive interface" or "recognized for strong customer support." Negative sentiment may surface mentions of limitations or customer frustrations that appear in AI training data.

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2. Presence Quality (up to 20 points)

Presence quality measures three components: 

  • Mention depth: How substantively answer engines discuss your brand, beyond surface mentions
  • Source quality: The authority of sources that have shaped AI's understanding of your brand
  • Data richness: The variety and completeness of information available about your brand in AI training data
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3. Brand Recognition (up to 20 points)

Measures how widely recognized your brand is across AI training data. A high recognition score means answer engines can discuss your brand with depth and specificity, not just acknowledge that it exists.

 

4. Share of Voice (up to 10 points)

Assesses your brand's competitive presence in AI-generated responses relative to your category. Scoring includes your brand's estimated percentage of category voice plus a rank bonus. 

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5. Market Competition (up to 10 points)

Classifies how answer engines position your brand competitively. Two components contribute:

  • Category role: Leader, Challenger, or Niche Player
  • Innovation perception: Innovator, Disruptor, or Traditionalist

A low Market Competition score typically means answer engines have insufficient or inconsistent signals about where your brand stands competitively. 

How To Measure Brand Visibility In AI Engines

HubSpot's AEO Grader evaluates how your brand appears across the AI systems shaping customer perception – including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Follow these steps to get started:

Step 1: Enter Your Brand Information

Input your company name, location, industry, and product/service. The tool accepts any brand – analyze your own company or evaluate a competitor's AI positioning.

Step 2: Cross-Platform AI Analysis

HubSpot's AEO Grader sends your brand information to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini and asks each model how it characterizes your brand based on its training data. 

Step 3: Composite Score Calculation

Your results are calculated across all five dimensions using deterministic scoring with schema validation and retry logic, producing a total score out of 100.

Step 4: Full Brand Assessment Report

Complete the form to access your full results: your composite score, a breakdown, and a written interpretation of what your scores mean. To move from a one-time snapshot to continuous tracking, HubSpot AEO monitors your brand visibility week over week across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.

Ready to boost your answer engine performance?

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Your grade is a starting point. HubSpot AEO is what comes next.

Your competitors are already showing up in AI answers. HubSpot AEO helps you be the answer.

Track your brand visibility over time, see where competitors are winning, and learn exactly what to fix. $50/month – no HubSpot subscription required.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Answer engines – LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini – synthesize information from multiple sources to deliver direct responses, bypassing traditional link lists entirely. Unlike conventional search, they control how your brand is presented to millions of daily users. Use HubSpot's AEO Grader to understand your visibility across these critical discovery channels.

The AEO Grader currently analyzes GPT-5.2 (OpenAI), Perplexity, and Gemini (Google). Results are cross-validated across all three platforms to produce a reliable composite assessment.

The score combines five weighted dimensions: Sentiment Analysis (40 pts), Presence Quality (20 pts), Brand Recognition (20 pts), Share of Voice (10 pts), and Market Competition (10 pts). Sentiment carries the most weight because it measures how AI characterizes your brand, not just whether it recognizes you. Scores are cross-validated across GPT-5.2, Perplexity, and Gemini.

Yes. HubSpot's AEO Grader accepts any brand name, enabling direct competitive intelligence. Understanding how answer engines characterize your competitors – their market position, sentiment patterns, and recognition depth – will give you a point of comparison for your own scores.

Answer engines update their training data regularly, so brand perception can shift without warning. HubSpot recommends at the minimum monthly AEO Grader analysis to track sentiment trends and competitive positioning, plus quarterly deep-dives for strategic planning.

AEO (answer engine optimization) improves how your brand appears in AI-generated responses on platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. SEO improves your ranking in traditional search results. The key difference: SEO drives website traffic; AEO shapes how AI represents your brand when buyers skip search entirely.

HubSpot's AEO Grader is most useful for marketing leaders, brand managers, SEO professionals, and content strategists who want to understand how AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini currently represent their brand – and where perception gaps exist. For deeper analysis, HubSpot AEO is available standalone for $50/month or included in Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise.

Use low-scoring dimensions to identify where your brand presence is weakest in AI training data. A low Presence Quality score signals limited third-party coverage or thin website content; a low Sentiment score may indicate negative associations worth investigating. For ongoing tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, HubSpot AEO is available from $50/month.

Effective AEO best practices include publishing case studies with measurable outcomes, maintaining consistent messaging across owned and third-party channels, securing coverage in reputable publications, and structuring content so answer engines accurately associate your brand with the right capabilities. Use HubSpot's AEO Grader to benchmark your current AI brand perception before optimizing.

Yes – there is no cost to run an AEO Grader analysis. Simply enter your brand information, let the tool run its assessment across GPT-5.2, Perplexity, and Gemini, and complete a short form to access your full results.

AEO Grader is a free one-time diagnostic that scores your brand and returns a snapshot of how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini currently represent you. HubSpot AEO is an ongoing monitoring tool that tracks visibility across specific prompts, compares competitors, and delivers prioritized recommendations – at only $50/month. 

The Grader answers "how does AI represent my brand right now?" HubSpot AEO answers "how is that changing, and what should I do about it?"