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HubSpot is releasing a slate of tools designed to help businesses improve awareness, grow revenue, and scale customer support. It’s part of the company’s annual Spring Spotlight event. And while there are more than 100 announcements to parse through, the one that may impact HubSpot’s customers the most is the launch of HubSpot AEO. It’s an app built to help marketers show up when buyers search on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
For more than 20 years, HubSpot has been at the forefront of inbound marketing, an approach focused on attracting potential customers through valuable content and experiences. It has always been about meeting buyers where they are, and that’s largely meant search. However, in the generative AI era, where buyers are is changing.
“How buyers search is fundamentally changing,” Yamini Rangan, HubSpot’s chief executive, says in a statement. “They are asking questions in places like ChatGPT and Gemini, and the companies that show up in those answers are already winning. That’s exactly why we’ve built HubSpot AEO: to help businesses improve their AI visibility, grow brand awareness, and ultimately drive more qualified leads.”
The Lightning Pole Moment for AEO
Whether you call it Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), or AI Optimization (AIO), there’s growing evidence that LLM-referred traffic shouldn’t be ignored by businesses. In HubSpot’s case, it found that 42 percent of buyers researching its solutions used an answer engine at some point.
“Why it’s becoming so important right now is that businesses are looking for a new way to grow,” Kipp Bodnar, HubSpot’s chief marketing officer, explains in an interview with The AI Economy. “Distribution is becoming the long pole in the tent as AI makes building products, getting feedback, and providing customer service so much easier for everyone…It’s just like a lightning pole moment.”
For years, marketers treated search engines as puzzles to solve—reverse-engineering Google, Bing, and Yahoo’s algorithms to push their sites to the top of results pages. Landing among the famed 10 blue links was a milestone worth celebrating, but earning that spot was grueling work, and staying there was even harder—one algorithm change could decimate inbound traffic.
“What’s happening is that the question complexity, whether it’s with AI mode in Google, ChatGPT, or Perplexity, is essentially an order of magnitude more complex,” Bodnar says. “So, if it was four words before, it’s 40 words now in a kind of AEO-driven world.”
He also contends that SEO requires more patience before seeing if the labor bears any fruit. It could take an estimated three to six months before any traction is generated. On the other hand, AEO seems to have the opposite effect, demonstrating value immediately. “You’re going to get value faster, the action items are going to be clear, and you’re going to be able to see your progress clearer and faster than you did on the SEO side of things,” Bodnar states.
HubSpot AEO is the result of HubSpot’s 2025 acquisition of XFunnel. Founded by Beeri Amiel and Neri Bluman, the startup specialized in helping companies navigate the world of AI search by providing “transparency to the black box of AI search.” Now, as part of the HubSpot team, Amiel and Bluman built what Bodnar describes as “XFunnel 2.0”.
“The XFunnel team took all the learnings [from] what they built for XFunnel and basically built an XFunnel 2.0,” he explains. “Like if they knew all the things they knew after they built it the first time, what they would have started with. They built that…as part of the HubSpot platform, so it had all the context and integrates across our marketing products, but also gets all that CRM context that’s…so valuable.”
“It is essentially XFunnel 2.0 native to HubSpot,” Bodnar emphasizes.
However, HubSpot isn’t alone in this mission, and its AEO tool joins an increasingly crowded marketplace. It faces competition from tools by Profound, Semrush, Adobe, and BrightEdge. So what makes HubSpot AEO unique?
Bodnar points to two advantages: The first is context. Because HubSpot AEO sits inside the broader HubSpot ecosystem, it can draw on CRM data, customer behavior, and existing content—giving it a richer foundation for recommendations than any standalone tool can offer. “Our ability to get you up and running and recommend prompts to track is just far superior to everybody else’s,” he claims.
The second advantage is distribution. Bodnar highlights HubSpot’s partnerships with Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube—three platforms whose content is heavily cited by answer engines like Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. “We can basically go from, ‘hey, you’re tracking these prompts, here are the actions you would take to show up in this prompt—create a video, engage in this thread on Reddit, create a LinkedIn, create a blog post on your own site,” Bodnar states. “We can help people do that much faster and much higher quality than I think anybody else at this moment.”
How Does HubSpot AEO Work?
While HubSpot AEO may work best alongside the company’s broader suite of tools, it doesn’t require a full HubSpot subscription. Anyone can use it as a standalone app. To start, provide HubSpot AEO with your brand name along with any variations. The system will then use any internal and external data to identify your competitors. After the information is verified, the app will generate recommended prompts and ask about your ideal customer profile—who do you want to reach? What’s your target market? What product are you trying to sell?
HubSpot AEO will provide a list of prompts it recommends you track. Alternatively, you can import a CSV of pre-written prompts you also want to monitor.
“It’s going to show you what your essential awareness across those prompts is,” Bodnar says. “It’s going to show you what your awareness is versus your competitors. And then, what’s the sentiment—positive or negative—for you versus your competitors?” He explains that some companies might “have high awareness but very negative sentiment,” which could lead them to try and reverse that trend.
All the prompts are continuously monitored across the three main answer engines—ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity. HubSpot currently doesn’t support other platforms, including GPT-powered ones like Microsoft Copilot.
The CRM-powered prompt suggestions, execution-tied recommendations, the brand visibility dashboard with sentiment analysis, competitor share-of-voice tracking, and citation analysis are all available today. However, the ability to act on recommendations directly inside of HubSpot AEO won’t be available until later this year.
Notably, this isn’t HubSpot’s first foray into AEO. The company already offers an AEO Grader, a free tool that examines your brand using training data from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini, then generates a brand perception analysis across five areas: brand recognition, market score, presence quality, brand sentiment, and share of voice.
But the Grader has limits: It offers a one-time snapshot of how aware AI is of your brand. There are no recommendations, no prompt monitoring, no path to action. HubSpot AEO is built to go further.
Customers subscribed to HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise plans will receive access to this AEO tool at no additional charge. For those wishing to use it as a standalone app, it’ll cost $50 per month.
Breeze Agent Updates
Besides HubSpot AEO, another noteworthy announcement from HubSpot today involves the company’s Breeze Agents, namely its Prospecting and Customer Agents.
Introduced in 2024, the Prospecting Agent can be used to research potential customers, identify decision-makers, score leads, and develop better outreach strategies. Last September, HubSpot updated it with deep research capabilities, enabling it to probe data across multiple sources to create account plans for sales representatives.
Today, the Prospecting Agent can manage the entire prospecting lifecycle, drawing on CRM history and intent signals to inform its actions. It can identify buying signals, prioritize accounts, sort contacts matching target personas, and pull in new contacts from third-party providers. It can also handle all personalized outreach.
HubSpot reports that early testing shows this agent’s outreach response rates are more than double industry benchmarks.
As for the Customer Agent, teams can better control how the agent behaves across all channels. HubSpot is adding granular guidelines for tone and style, channel-specific settings, reply recommendations for human review, multi-brand support, working hours, percentage rollouts, and deploy-via-workflows for targeting specific ticket types.
These updated Breeze Agents are available today, with both under new outcome-based pricing taking effect on April 14. Prospecting Agent now costs $1 per recommended lead, while the Customer Agent costs $0.50 per resolution. HubSpot is offering a 28-day free trial for each.
Featured Image: An AI-generated image showing someone searching for information on Google versus using a conversational AI agent. Credit: Microsoft Copilot
