15 Best AEO Agencies for HubSpot Users, Ranked
You've been asked to get your company into the answers buyers see in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and you have to do it with the site that's already live. Nobody has offered budget for a new one, and nobody has said what counts as progress. You can start with what's there. Your published pages have URLs you can keep. Where the HubSpot tracking code is installed, you also have traffic history for those pages and a CRM record of where contacts came from.
The strategy that fits an existing site is a monthly loop on those pages. You pick a few buyer questions and give each one a page you already have and a person who owns the edit. A subject expert confirms the facts before the update publishes at the same URL. By the end of the month, you have a dated record of what the answer engines said and what your CRM recorded. That record is what you bring when someone asks whether the work is doing anything, and it's what next month's choices are based on.
You don't need a rebuild to start. Google's guide to its generative AI search features, last updated July 10, 2026, says those features run on its core Search systems and need no special schema markup. It also says there's no requirement to break content into tiny pieces. That guidance covers Google only. We'd start in the same place for any engine: with what your pages say and who keeps them accurate. At Lean Labs, we run AEO directly through a client's HubSpot content, website, analytics, and CRM, so we plan this work around the account a team already has. Starting there keeps the plan off a redesign nobody has funded.
What HubSpot includes depends on your subscription
|
Tool |
What it gives the program |
Subscription HubSpot requires |
|
AEO |
Runs your tracked prompts daily in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, then reports brand visibility, share of voice, and citations |
Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise, or a HubSpot AEO subscription |
|
AEO recommendations |
Content suggestions based on the sources answer engines cite for your tracked prompts, plus a site audit that scans your own pages for content and technical issues. Each recommendation has a priority, status, and assignee |
Same as AEO |
|
SEO recommendations |
A scan of page HTML with filters for impact, technical difficulty, and role |
Marketing Hub or Content Hub Professional or Enterprise for the domain-wide tool. Recommendations inside the content editor are in all accounts |
|
Web traffic analysis |
Sessions, new contacts and customers by source, with AI Referrals as its own source |
Marketing Hub or Content Hub Professional or Enterprise, or legacy Marketing Hub Basic |
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HubSpot's AEO setup article lists 25 daily prompts for Marketing Hub Professional and for a HubSpot AEO subscription, and 50 for Marketing Hub Enterprise. HubSpot's articles on prompts and recommendations add a requirement: a Super Admin has to turn on several AI settings first, so find that person in week one.
If Marketing Hub sits beside a site hosted in another CMS, the edits happen there. HubSpot's SEO scan still covers externally hosted pages, and its traffic reports cover them once the HubSpot tracking code is installed.
If your account has none of the AEO tools, the loop still runs. You track fewer questions by hand and keep the results in a spreadsheet.
Start with the questions sales already hears
With 25 prompt slots on Professional or 50 on Enterprise, you can't track everything a buyer could ask, so the prompt list is a priority decision. HubSpot generates suggested prompts from your brand details, competitors, products, and ideal customer profiles. Treat those as a first draft. The questions your sales and support teams hear on calls are strong candidates because a real buyer asked them while deciding.
Calls aren't the only place to look. When we run AEO in HubSpot, we build the question set from sales calls, CRM insights, Search Console demand, and competitor prompts. Use whichever of those your team can reach this month, and add the rest as access opens up.
Write each prompt the way the buyer phrased the question. HubSpot's prompt documentation adds a locale point: use the language your buyers write in where they are, so Spanish for buyers in Spain. HubSpot also lets you put prompts in groups. We'd group them by the page that should answer them. Then a change to one page maps to a known set of prompts when you review results.
Suppose a B2B software team on Marketing Hub Professional, with its site on HubSpot's CMS, keeps hearing one question from finance buyers: does the product connect to NetSuite, and what does setup cost? The site has an integrations page that names NetSuite and says nothing about the setup fee or how long setup takes. That question goes into a tracked prompt, and the integrations page becomes its assigned page.
Give each question a page and an owner
Look for an existing page that should answer the question before you plan a new one. Editing that page keeps its URL and the traffic history HubSpot holds for it. Write a new page only when no current page has the job.
Five roles cover the work: a strategist, an editor, a subject expert, a HubSpot or web owner, and an analyst. On a small team, one person can hold several of them. The table shows one month for the NetSuite example.
|
Week |
Input |
Owner |
Decision |
Output |
|
1 |
Questions from sales calls and the other sources you can reach, plus last month's AEO results |
Strategist |
Which questions get worked on this month, and which page answers each |
A list that pairs every question with a page and an editor |
|
1 |
The assigned pages, plus technical findings from the AEO site audit |
HubSpot or web owner |
Whether each page is indexed and open to the search crawlers, and which findings block the edit |
Access confirmed, or a fix scheduled ahead of the editor's work |
|
2 |
The integrations page and the NetSuite question |
Editor, with an implementation engineer as the subject expert |
What the page states as fact: the setup fee with its unit, the setup time, the conditions |
A draft in the HubSpot editor that the expert has approved |
|
3 |
The approved draft, plus SEO recommendations filtered to the developer role |
HubSpot or web owner |
Whether a template or schema change has to ship with the new copy |
The update published at the same URL, with a dated entry in the change log |
|
4 |
AEO results, saved answers and web traffic analysis |
Analyst |
Keep, revise or retire each question |
A dated observation record and next month's candidate list |
The Owner column is what keeps the month moving. Each decision belongs to one person, so the NetSuite edit doesn't stall between the marketer who wants it and the engineer who knows the fee.
The subject expert's approval is in the schedule because an answer engine that cites your page repeats what the page says. If the setup fee on the page is wrong, the wrong fee now reaches buyers who never visit your site.
HubSpot can hold the task list. Each AEO recommendation has an assignee and a status you can set to in progress, done, or dismissed, and completed recommendations stay tied to the prompts they affect. For technical work, the SEO recommendations tool has a role filter that separates items a marketer can handle from items that need a developer. Its scan reads page HTML only, so content loaded through scripts, such as CTAs, isn't part of what it checks.
Clear access problems before you edit copy
A page an engine can't reach gains nothing from better copy, so the web owner checks access in week one, before the editor starts. Google and OpenAI each document their own control.
For Google, a page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and the site has to be included in Search generative AI features. Search Console has a Search generative AI setting under Settings, with Include as the default. A property with a parent follows the parent's choice by default, and its owner can change that, so confirm the setting on the property that covers your domain.
For ChatGPT search, OpenAI's crawler documentation says a site that opts out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. That crawler is separate from GPTBot, which collects training data, and robots.txt can allow one and block the other. OpenAI says a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to register for search.
Inside HubSpot, the site audit in AEO recommendations runs two scans. The technical audit checks structured data markup, canonical tags, page speed signals, and crawlability. The content audit scans your pages against your tracked prompts. Run both on your domain in week one, so a blocking issue gets fixed ahead of the new copy.
Keep your own record of answers and changes
HubSpot's AEO dashboard reports brand visibility, share of voice, and the domains cited most often. Brand visibility is a percentage score for how often your brand appears in answers across your tracked prompts. An answer that names you and quotes the wrong setup fee counts toward that percentage the same as a correct one.
So for each question you worked on that month, the analyst runs the prompt and saves what came back: the prompt wording, the engine, the date, the answer text, and every cited URL. Keep a second log for changes, with the page, what changed, who approved it, and the publish date. The two logs together give you a sequence: the fee went live on the 14th, and the answer saved on the 28th quoted it. That sequence doesn't prove the edit caused the citation. It does give you dated evidence to reason from, which a score alone can't.
HubSpot can add to that record for a page you've edited. In a site audit recommendation, the Impact tab lets you track a URL from a start date you set and see how often answer engines reference that page.
Hold the prompt set steady while you compare. HubSpot measures brand visibility across the prompts you track, so adding or deleting prompts can move the number with no change to any page. If you change the competitors HubSpot tracks, only future runs reflect the change, so start the comparison after that date. HubSpot also advises reviewing several days or weeks of results before reading a trend, because engines return different answers to the same prompt.
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Review visibility and pipeline as two separate questions
HubSpot reports answer visibility and CRM outcomes in different places, and one can't stand in for the other. For visibility, use the AEO dashboard and your saved answers. For CRM outcomes, open web traffic analysis and find the AI Referrals row. HubSpot's traffic source definitions count visits from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, and several other assistants in that source, and the report shows sessions, new contacts, and customers beside it. Clicking the session count shows which platform sent the visits.
We measure the AEO programs we run on the same layers: AEO visibility, then AI referral traffic, then the contacts, deals, and pipeline HubSpot records. Reading them in that order shows where the chain stops, which tells you what to work on next.
HubSpot keeps regular Google and Bing search in organic search and counts only AI-specific domains such as gemini.google.com as AI Referrals. An AI Overview sits on a regular Google results page, so under that definition, a click from one is counted as organic search. For Google's AI features, use the generative AI performance report in Search Console, which Google's guide describes as the view of how people discover your content through those features.
A buyer who reads an answer and never clicks creates no session at all, so the AI Referrals row can't show that buyer. HubSpot also reprocesses analytics, which can change past figures. Export the report each month if you want a fixed baseline.
High brand visibility with no AI Referrals contacts is a finding to investigate. Look at which pages the engines cite and whether those pages give a reader a next step. If a few referral contacts arrive through a page tied to a question you never tracked, that question belongs on next month's list.
Decide where the first month starts
Every month after the first opens with last month's results. The first has none, so its questions and pages come from the sources you already have: the questions sales and support hear, plus the pages and access findings from week one.
We can help you make that first choice. We run AEO directly through your HubSpot content, website, analytics, and CRM, so the question list and page assignments you've drafted are the right material to bring. Book an AEO strategy meeting with us, and we'll go through where you stand in AI search right now, which AI models mention your competitors, and the quick wins to start getting cited. With those answers, you can choose month one's questions from evidence, and you'll know whether AEO is the right fit for your business.