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The Background
Schools have always relied on search to find ideas, compare tools, and choose trusted partners. Now, more of that discovery is happening through AI assistants, chatbots, and AI-generated summaries — the same channels where a marketing director’s years of reputation-building can be erased in a single AI answer that leaves their school out of it.
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That shift has major implications for Finalsite. As school teams look for answers about websites, enrollment software, and communication tools, Finalsite needs to appear in the responses shaping those early decisions. Finalsite’s AEO strategy is designed to strengthen that visibility. By earning a place in AI-driven answers, Finalsite can stay competitive when schools are searching for products, guidance, and partners to support their online presence and better serve their communities.
Finalsite has spent more than two decades making sure schools do not lose that moment. Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Glastonbury, Connecticut, Finalsite is the preferred website, communications, and marketing platform for more than 7,000 schools and school districts in 119 countries. Its connected platform spans websites, communication tools, AI chat, enrollment management, and marketing services, the full stack a school needs to attract the right families, tell a compelling story, and convert interest into enrollment. With more than 500 employees, many of whom have worked in schools themselves, Finalsite understands the stakes from both sides of the desk.
As AI-generated answers began shaping how school leaders research products, compare solutions, and evaluate trusted partners, Finalsite faced an important question: was its own brand showing up in the moments that matter, and was its approach to visibility keeping pace with the way schools now find guidance and solutions?
The Challenge
For the schools Finalsite serves, the discovery journey for edtech partners looks different than it did even two years ago. Marketing directors, enrollment leaders, superintendents, and administrators are no longer relying only on traditional search results and vendor websites to compare options. They are asking AI assistants questions like, "Which education technology companies work with the largest districts?" or "What tools help schools improve websites, enrollment, and family engagement?" and using those answers to shape their early research.
If Finalsite is not included in those answers, it may miss an early opportunity to connect with the school teams evaluating solutions.
Connor Gleason, Finalsite’s Director of Content and Brand Marketing, felt this shift acutely. Finalsite had always been strong at organic search. The team practiced what they preached: thoughtful on-page optimization, consistent thought leadership, a content engine that earned real visibility. What Connor recognized early was that strong traditional SEO and strong AI search visibility had become two different disciplines entirely.
A Kitchen Full of Ingredients, No Recipe
The challenge was not awareness: it was clarity. Finalsite had been using Semrush for keyword strategy and organic tracking. Connor found it useful for keyword strategy and organic tracking. When it came to AI-driven search behavior, though, Semrush produced information overload — dense data sets with little guidance on what actually mattered for the school audiences Finalsite was trying to reach.
"You’re hungry, but if you’re in a kitchen with every ingredient you could imagine, you don’t really know where to start," Connor said. "Data is only as good as what you can do with it."
What Finalsite needed was not more data. It needed clarity: where was the brand showing up in AI-generated answers? What was being said about it? Where were the gaps in the buyer journey that left prospective school clients, and through them, the families those schools serve, without the information they needed to make a confident decision?
The Solution
What families increasingly experience as a clean, confident AI answer is the product of a content strategy built beneath the surface. For Finalsite, getting into those answers required a tool that showed where the brand ranked, what was being said about it, how sentiment was trending, and where the content strategy had gaps worth closing.
As part of HubSpot’s AEO beta, Connor integrated HubSpot’s AI-powered optimization tools into Finalsite’s workflow. The AEO dashboard became something he checked the way a trader checks markets: first thing every morning, before email, before Slack, a live pulse on where Finalsite was showing up across AI-powered search and answer engines.
HubSpot’s AEO dashboard was built for action. Connor could see visibility metrics and sentiment scores side by side, watch how they trended, and move directly to the Recommendations tab to understand exactly what to do next. High-priority items were flagged clearly: write a blog, create a listicle, pursue an outreach mention, build a comparison page. The platform did not just surface problems; it pointed toward solutions.
Recommendations That Know the Audience
What separated HubSpot AEO from other tools was the connection to CRM data. Finalsite feeds marketing data into HubSpot, and that CRM context made every AEO recommendation more specific and more valuable than what a standalone platform could offer.
"We wanted access to the context of our actual audience," Connor said. "Other platforms can suggest a lot of different prompts, but it’s at such a broad level that it has really little value to what we’re trying to do." With HubSpot, recommendations reflected the questions and needs coming directly from Finalsite’s client base, including the marketing directors, enrollment leaders, communications teams, and school administrators guiding family engagement and school growth. Instead of chasing broad keywords, Connor was reverse-engineering content to meet real audience demand at each stage of the buyer journey.
Breeze, HubSpot’s AI assistant, became part of that daily rhythm as well. When the AEO dashboard surfaced a set of metrics, Connor used Breeze to translate the data into a clear action plan, cutting through the noise to identify what the numbers meant and what next month’s content calendar should reflect.
Kristen Doverspike, Finalsite’s Senior Director of Growth Marketing, noted that HubSpot’s reporting capabilities had become equally essential for proving marketing’s impact. Journey reports and campaign attribution tools, including the ability to retroactively associate marketing activities with campaigns, gave the team a cleaner line from effort to enrollment pipeline than they had been able to draw before.
The Transformation
For the school administrators and enrollment teams who rely on Finalsite, visibility is not an abstract metric. It is what allows a marketing director to walk into a board meeting with proof — proof that their school is the trusted name families find when they turn to AI for answers. Finalsite’s ability to show up in AI-generated answers, to be the trusted answer when a parent asks an AI assistant about school marketing platforms, directly shapes whether the school leaders Finalsite serves look credible to the boards, families, and communities counting on them.
With HubSpot’s AEO tool, Finalsite had a measurable signal that its AEO work is having the intended impact. Finalsite now ranks first in share of voice among competitors in AI-driven search, showing that its content is gaining visibility and helping the brand stay competitive in the conversations school leaders are having online. Sentiment scores have held steady and trended upward, signaling that how Finalsite appears in AI-generated responses matches how the company wants to be perceived.
From Overwhelming to Clear
The operational shift has been just as significant. The anxiety of wading through dense, contextless data has given way to something that feels, in Connor’s words, like a game, one worth playing every morning.
"There’s a little bit of a gamification to it," he said. "Seeing where I can make the most impact as quickly as possible is great." When Connor acts on a recommendation and watches the data respond, the feedback loop is visible and motivating. "It’s great to see that the effort I’m making is having an impact and making a difference. To be able to see that reflected in the data is really inspiring."
A New Way to Think About Content
Beyond sentiment and share of voice, HubSpot’s AEO tools changed how Finalsite thinks about the full content funnel. Connor identified specific gaps where school clients were not finding the answers they needed: mid-funnel comparison content, clearer explanations of product benefits, and thought leadership that clarified Finalsite’s position against competitors.
For Finalsite, HubSpot AEO shifted the orientation of the entire content strategy — away from chasing rankings and toward becoming the answer schools are already looking for.
"I love how it connects with our CRM and taps into our buyer personas," Connor said. "The recommendations are much more specific than traditional keyword recommendations. I’m starting to think about our content in a more focused way, showing up for the most appropriate AI responses, not just showing up somewhere."
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