Be the business AI recommends.

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. HubSpot offers a free 28-day trial of AEO that includes 10 prompts in ChatGPT so you can see how your brand is showing up in AI search before committing. No credit card required.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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.