Our free AEO Baseline Score scans how your brand shows up in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. It returns a citation gap report and a competitor snapshot, with no credit card and no commitment.

HubSpot's AEO product page prices its tracking tool at $50 a month and says no other HubSpot subscription is required. It tracks 25 prompts, the questions buyers ask an AI assistant, across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Its brand visibility score is the percentage of answers to those prompts in which your brand appears.

HubSpot's AEO setup guide lists a 28-day free trial of the standalone tool. Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise also track brand visibility. On those two editions, the guide's feature table adds blog post generation and prompt suggestions drawn from your CRM.

You don't need Professional to start. If you plan to buy it anyway, HubSpot for Startups lists 90% off the first year for companies that have raised pre-seed, seed or Series A funding but no Series B. You also need verified venture funding or an affiliation with one of HubSpot's approved startup partners. The discount covers only Professional or Enterprise products that are new to your account.

Because the tracking costs $50 a month, tracking isn't what you hire an agency for. You hire one for the work around it: deciding which buyer questions to follow, then building and publishing the pages that answer them. A month of your own readings lets you ask every agency what it would do about the specific prompts where a competitor appears and you don't.

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What the five agencies say

The table shows what each agency's own page listed as of October 2026. SpotiFlow calls the same work GEO, short for generative engine optimization. Its pricing page shows euros by default and calls its figures estimates until an audit confirms them.

What the first payment sets up for you

Our GrowthRocket Visibility Suite is a one-time setup, and the page lists pricing. It follows the free baseline score, so you see your starting point before you pay for anything.

The setup builds the things answer engines read on your own site. The answer hub is a set of question-and-answer pages organized by topic, so an engine can match what your company knows to the question a buyer asked. We build it in HubSpot, which means your team can update an answer without a developer.

Schema markup is code that states what a page is about in a form machines can read. Ours covers Organization, FAQ, and credential types, and it declares what your business does and why it's credible. The suite also sets up a pipeline that collects reviews from your customers and distributes them to G2, Clutch, and Google, because answer engines weigh what other sites say about you.

For a small team, the form of the deliverable matters as much as the price. When our first step ends, the answer hub and the markup are on your site. Nobody on your side has to find the hours to turn a plan into pages.

The other three priced first steps are sold as an audit or an assessment. Nextiny's SEO + AEO Audit is a 20-hour project for $6,000, which its page describes as an analysis of where you are, some quick wins, and a plan for ongoing work. Orange Marketing's Quick Wins AEO costs $6,950 for an assessment, schema markup recommendations, and drafts for five web pages and three FAQ sections. Its package table lists a pillar page with four supporting blog posts for the three-month program only. SpotiFlow's GEO Audit costs €4,990 and is written so you can carry it out yourself. Its page-rewrite package arrives as drafts in your portal.

Simple Machines Marketing's AEO page publishes no price. It describes configuring and managing HubSpot's AEO dashboard inside your portal.

A plan or a set of drafts suits a team with a marketer or developer who has the hours to publish it. If yours doesn't, start with a first step that ends with the pages on your site, which is how ours is scoped. Ask every agency which deliverables from its first step will be live when the step ends.

What is needed from your team

We build the list of questions the program tracks from your HubSpot sales calls, CRM insights, Search Console demand, and competitor prompts. So the program follows questions your buyers are already asking.

You also don't have to adopt a new platform. The program runs on the HubSpot site and CRM you already have. And we connect AI visibility to HubSpot campaigns, contacts, and deals, so you can report on AEO by the pipeline it influences as well as by mentions and citations.

What we do need from you is clear positioning. A startup can begin AEO without a large content library, as long as it knows which category it sells in. Tracked prompts come from that category, so a change of category resets the prompt list and the baseline with it. HubSpot's case study on Threekit, which sells quoting software to manufacturers, shows the cost. It quotes Threekit's VP of Sales and Marketing describing "basically zero visibility" in AEO and SEO after the company repositioned.

So if you're still proving demand for the product, keep HubSpot's tracking running and hire an agency once the offer is settled. That holds for us as much as for anyone else.

Nextiny's method starts by capturing your team's expertise from webinars, conversations, and sales calls. SpotiFlow works only on HubSpot Content Hub, the HubSpot product that hosts your website pages and blog, and its fit list says you can publish approved drafts within about two weeks. Orange's first step lists recommendations and drafts for five web pages, so ask who publishes them.

Check which sites the engines cite before you pay for off-site work

Off-site work gets your company described on other websites that answer engines draw from. It matters because an engine checks several sources before it recommends a company, so a claim that appears only on your own site carries less weight than one other sites repeat.

Our Authority System is the off-site program. It runs for 10 months and covers monthly expert articles placed on authority sites, brand mentions on trusted platforms, and progress reporting with citation tracking. SpotiFlow lists digital PR only in its top monthly plan, from €6,990 a month. Nextiny's and Orange's pages describe distributing content on other channels without tying that work to a package.

Your baseline shows whether off-site work comes first. HubSpot's tool has a Top domains report that lists the websites answer engines cite most often across your tracked prompts. If review sites such as G2 lead the list, the review pipeline in our first step is the part that reaches them. If trade publications lead it, placed articles are the work aimed at those sites, and that is the Authority System. If vendor sites like yours fill the list, start with your own pages.

What a $30,000 AEO plan covers in a year

Suppose you've set aside $30,000 for AEO over the next 12 months, and you want work built on your site. HubSpot's tool takes $600 of that at $50 a month, which leaves $29,400.

Suppose also that the one-time on-site build you're quoted comes to $10,000. The other two rows use published dollar prices from the comparison above. Each uses the agency's monthly program, because that is where its page lists implementation work, and leaves out the audit or assessment it lists as a first step. Nextiny states no term, so its row shows the five months that $29,400 covers at the starting price.

A one-time setup changes what the rest of the budget can do. The on-site foundation is built with one payment, and in this example $19,400 is still yours to direct. Take new readings after the build and look at the Top domains report again. Then you can decide with evidence whether the next dollar goes to more pages or to off-site work.

Our Authority System suits a company whose Top domains report shows the engines citing trade publications and that has funded AEO as a channel for the year. AEO Complete adds a dedicated AEO strategist, monthly strategy sessions, and an AI citation dashboard to the on-site and off-site work, for a company that wants one team running all of it.

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What to get in writing before you sign

HubSpot's setup guide says AEO runs tracked prompts daily and that responses change over time, so it advises reviewing several days or weeks before judging a trend. A single pair of before-and-after readings can differ for that reason alone.

Google's guidance on third-party SEO tools and services, which covers tools sold under the AEO and GEO names, says third-party tools don't have access to its internal ranking data and can't guarantee performance. So the promise to look for in an agreement is about method and remedy.

Ask any agency, us included, to put four things in the agreement:

• The prompt list, the engines, and the reading dates, so the before and after are measured the same way.
• Which deliverables will be live on your site at the end of each stage, and who publishes them.
• Whether a reported result counts mentions of your brand or citations of your pages, because HubSpot's tool reports those separately.
• What the agency does if the readings don't move.

Have the tracking tool set up in your own HubSpot account as well, so the readings stay with you after the engagement ends.

Start with the agency whose first step is built on your site

If your team is small and you need the on-site work built on your HubSpot site, talk to us first. Book an AEO strategy meeting, and we'll cover where you stand in AI search right now, which AI models mention your competitors and not you, quick wins to start getting cited, and whether AEO is the right fit for your business.