Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO): A playbook for HubSpot Users

The way your customers find information is undergoing a fundamental shift. For two decades, the goal was to earn a click from a list of blue links on a search engine results page. Today, that journey is changing. Customers are turning to AI tools like Google's AI Overviews,  ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity for direct, conversational answers, bypassing the traditional search process entirely.

Your New Front Page is an AI Answer

For businesses, this means the AI-generated answer is rapidly becoming your new front page, your first impression, and even your first sales call. If your brand isn't cited as a source of truth within that answer, you risk becoming invisible to a growing segment of your audience.

This new landscape has a name: Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO).

This guide is a practical playbook written specifically for marketing and growth teams using the HubSpot platform. We'll demystify AEO, translating abstract concepts into a clear, actionable strategy. Our goal is to provide you with the tools and tactics to ensure your valuable content and expertise are not just visible, but central to how AI answers your future customers' questions.

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1. What is AEO? A Simple Guide to the New Rules of Search

Before we dive into tactics, it’s crucial to understand what Answer Engine Optimisation is, how it differs from traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and why this shift represents such a significant opportunity for your business.

From Search Engine to Answer Engine

In simple terms, Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of optimising your content to be directly used or cited by AI-powered "answer engines." While some in the industry distinguish this from the broader Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), we focus on AEO as it homes in on the most critical outcome: becoming the definitive answer.

Traditional SEO has always been about climbing the rankings to earn a click. The goal is to be visible enough that a user chooses your link over a competitor's. AEO has a different primary objective: to be the answer, or a core part of the synthesised response the AI provides.

Think of it this way:

• SEO is like getting your book placed on the top shelf of a library, hoping someone sees it and checks it out.
• AEO is like having the librarian read a key passage from your book directly to the person asking the question.

In the AEO world, your content is no longer a destination; it is the raw material for the answer itself.

Is SEO Dead? (Spoiler: No, It’s Evolving)

Let's be clear: AEO is not a replacement for SEO. It's an evolution of it. Strong traditional SEO is the essential foundation for a successful AEO strategy. Generative AI platforms often draw on top-ranking, trusted search results from Google and Bing to gather fresh, real-time information. Without a solid organic presence, you are unlikely to show up in AI responses.

In fact, research shows a direct correlation: if you rank on page one of Google, your likelihood of appearing in an AI Overview is 25%. That figure jumps significantly if you hold position one. Many of the best practices that drive SEO performance, demonstrating authority (E-E-A-T), creating high-quality, user-focused content, and building a logical site structure, remain critically important. Think of AEO as training your website to answer questions clearly and directly, something Google has wanted for years anyway. It’s about adding a new, more precise layer of optimisation on top of your existing SEO efforts.

Why Should My Team Care About AEO?

Adopting an AEO strategy isn't just about keeping up with trends; it’s about driving tangible business results and future-proofing your brand. Here’s why it should be a priority:

• Higher-Quality Traffic: While the volume of traffic from AI answers may be lower initially, the quality is often far superior. These visitors have already received a trusted summary and are further down the buying funnel. In fact, HubSpot found that traffic from LLMs converts about 3x better than traditional search, and Webflow reported a 6x higher conversion rate.
• Brand Authority and Trust: When an AI engine like ChatGPT or Google Gemini cites your brand as a source, it confers an implicit layer of authority. You are positioned as a credible expert, building brand equity with every relevant answer you provide.
• Control Your Narrative: What happens when an LLM pulls information about your company from an outdated review site or a misinformed forum thread? You lose control of your brand's story. AEO is about proactively providing AI with a clear, accurate, and up-to-date source of truth, ensuring your narrative is told correctly.
• Early-Mover Advantage: AEO is still a nascent field. The brands that invest in optimising their content now can capture a significant share of voice in AI responses before the space becomes saturated and more competitive.

To truly optimise for these answer engines, we first need to understand a little more about how they find their information.

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2. How Answer Engines Work (And Why Your HubSpot Site is the Perfect Starting Point)

Winning at AEO requires a mental shift from thinking purely about keywords to understanding how AI models retrieve, process, and synthesise information. This section provides a simple model for how these systems work and highlights why the structured, integrated nature of the HubSpot platform makes it an ideal launchpad for your AEO strategy.

How AI Finds and Builds Answers

Answer engines source their information in two primary ways:

1. Pre-trained Datasets: At their core, Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on vast, static snapshots of the internet. These datasets include massive archives like the Common Crawl, along with structured sources like Wikipedia, forums like Reddit, and extensive collections of digital books. This forms their foundational knowledge.
2. The Live Web (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): To provide fresh, up-to-date answers, modern AI engines use a process called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). When you ask a question, the AI performs real-time searches on the live web, often by pulling information from the top-ranking results on Google and Bing. It then uses this fresh content to "augment" its pre-trained knowledge, synthesising a more accurate and current answer.

This is why your existing SEO performance directly impacts your AEO potential. To take it a step further, AI engines often break a single user query into multiple sub-queries in a process called "query fan-out." Answering a user's core question is no longer enough; you must also anticipate and answer the dozens of hidden micro-questions the AI generates behind the scenes.

Your HubSpot Advantage

If your website is built on the HubSpot CMS and your customer data lives in the HubSpot CRM, you are already in an excellent position to execute an AEO strategy. AEO success relies on having well-structured, interconnected, and consistently fresh content - all things the HubSpot platform is designed to facilitate.

HubSpot provides the foundational tools you need to implement AEO best practices effectively. You can:

• Build and manage topic clusters with the SEO tool to signal authority.
• Use Workflows to automate reminders for content freshness audits.
• Deploy reusable custom modules to implement technical schema across your site at scale.
• Leverage Smart Content to display tailored information to visitors matching specific ICP criteria.

With this foundational understanding, let's move on to the specific, practical actions you can take within your HubSpot portal to make your content more "AI-answerable."

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3. The AEO Playbook: 12 Practical Actions for HubSpot Users

This section is your core tactical playbook. The following actions are a prioritised, practical guide to increase the likelihood of your content being featured in AI-generated answers. Each of these steps can be implemented directly within your existing HubSpot ecosystem.

1. Add FAQ Schema to Key Pages
   • Why it matters: FAQ Page schema is a form of structured data that explicitly tells AI engines, "This content is a direct answer to a specific question." It significantly improves citation rates for pages that address common queries, making it a high-impact, low-effort win.
   • How to do it in HubSpot: Add a reusable FAQ custom module to your most important blog posts and service pages. Alternatively, for greater control, you can embed the required JSON-LD schema script directly into a page’s advanced settings in the head HTML section.
2. Implement 'Organisation' and 'Service' Schema
   • Why it matters: This schema provides AI models with structured, unambiguous information about who your company is, what you do, and where you operate. It’s a foundational step in controlling your brand narrative and ensuring LLMs have the correct facts.
   • How to do it in HubSpot: Add a JSON-LD script to the head HTML of your homepage and core service pages. Include key fields like your official company name, logo URL, a description of services offered, and links pointing to your social media profiles and key directory listings.
3. Signal Content Freshness
   • Why it matters: Research shows that AI engines have a strong bias towards recent content, with one analysis finding that 95% of ChatGPT's citations were from content updated in the last 10 months. Freshness is a powerful signal of relevance and trustworthiness.
   • How to do it in HubSpot: In your blog settings, ensure the "last updated" date is displayed on your posts. More importantly, create a HubSpot Workflow that automatically creates a task for the content owner to review and refresh key "answer content" every 90 or 180 days.
4. Adopt an 'Answer-First' Content Structure
   • Why it matters: LLMs are designed to find and deliver concise, direct answers. An "answer-first" format, where you provide a short summary answer in the very first paragraph, makes your content far more retrievable for AI.
   • How to do it in HubSpot: Review and rewrite the introduction of your key pillar pages and blog posts. Open with a brief, 1-2 sentence definition or summary that directly answers the core question before expanding on the details further down the page.
5. Write for 'Chunk-Level' Retrieval
   • Why it matters: AI models don't read entire pages; they retrieve short, self-contained passages, or "chunks," that best answer a specific sub-query. This is central to winning at "query fan-out." Each section of your content should be written to stand alone with clear context.
   • How to do it in HubSpot: Structure your articles in semantically dense sections of roughly 100-150 words. Ensure each section clearly includes the relevant entities (e.g., your company, the topic), the intended audience, and the key benefit or takeaway.
6. Build a HubSpot FAQ Hub
   • Why it matters: Centralising answers to dozens of common customer questions on a single, well-structured page creates a powerful asset for AI indexing. It reinforces your topical authority and provides a rich source of "chunks" to answer the AI's "query fan-out."
   • How to do it in HubSpot: Create a new landing page dedicated to FAQs. List 20 or more common questions and use expandable modules or rich text sections to provide the answers, ensuring the page is marked up with FAQ schema.
7. Strengthen Your Topic Clusters
   • Why it matters: A logical internal linking structure is one of the most powerful ways to show both users and AI models the relationship between concepts. It reinforces your site's authority on a particular topic.
   • How to do it in HubSpot: Use the HubSpot SEO tool to map out your pillar pages and cluster content. Go through your articles and add relevant, contextual internal links within the body text to connect related concepts and guide the AI through your expertise.
8. Create Specific Comparison Pages
   • Why it matters: Pages that compare solutions (e.g., "HubSpot vs. Salesforce for small agencies") are highly likely to be cited because they mirror how both human buyers and LLMs evaluate trade-offs for a specific use case, directly addressing "query fan-out."
   • How to do it in HubSpot: Build comparison pages that target a clear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and use case. Use HubSpot's built-in table modules to present a clear, feature-by-feature analysis that is easy for both humans and machines to parse.
9. Increase Mentions on Authoritative & UGC Sites
   • Why it matters: Analysis shows that LLMs pull heavily from sources like Reddit, YouTube, and trusted industry publications. Positive, contextual mentions on these sites act as powerful trust signals, often more so than traditional backlinks.
   • How to do it in HubSpot: Use HubSpot's campaign tools to track your digital PR outreach. Create a shared task queue for the team to engage in specific, high-value Reddit threads, and use the social media tools to monitor brand mentions that can be amplified.
10. Publish an 'AI Info Page'
    • Why it matters: This is a dedicated page on your site designed to be a single source of truth for LLMs. It’s a structured, factual briefing document on your brand, making it easy for AI to retrieve accurate information.
    • How to do it in HubSpot: Publish a new page (e.g., yourdomain.com/ai-info) that contains your core value proposition, key differentiators, ICPs, and a summary of services. Mark this page up with Organisation and Service schema to make it even more machine-readable.
11. Clearly Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
    • Why it matters: LLMs are increasingly tailoring results to a user's specific context. Explicitly naming who you serve in your content (e.g., "We help B2B SaaS companies...") helps the model confidently match your solution to the right user query.
    • How to do it in HubSpot: Create ICP-specific content clusters and explicitly state your target audience in your copy. Use HubSpot's Smart Content on key pages to display tailored examples or case studies to visitors matching specific firmographic criteria from your CRM.
12. Address 'Deal-Breakers' Head-On
    • Why it matters: Prospects often ask about potential objections like integrations, security, or pricing models. LLMs connect these questions to answers. By addressing these "deal-breakers" directly on your pages, you increase the chances of being recommended as a suitable fit.
    • How to do it in HubSpot: Add a "Common Objections" or "Key Considerations" section to your core service pages. You can use a global module or a reusable saved section to deploy this across multiple pages efficiently.

As you can expect, we are working through this list ourselves in a bid to improve our own AEO and have already begun implementing updates to schema and content. Our goal is to publish a stand-alone article on how we implemented AEO at Growth London with before-and-after results for comparison. Watch this space!

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4. Your Getting Started Checklist

For busy teams who want to take immediate, high-impact action, this checklist distils the playbook into the most critical first steps.

• Benchmark Your Site: Run your domain through the HubSpot AEO Grader to understand your current visibility and identify the biggest gaps.
• Pick 3 High-Priority Pages: Choose your homepage and two of your most important service or solution pages for your first optimisation sprint.
• Add Foundational Schema: Implement Organisation schema on your homepage and add FAQ schema to the three priority pages you selected.
• Rewrite for 'Answer-First': Edit the introduction of your three priority pages to provide a clear, one-sentence summary of the topic right at the top.
• Check Your robots.txt File: Ensure you are not accidentally blocking significant AI crawlers like GPTBot or Bingbot from accessing your site.
• Set Up a Content Refresh Reminder: Create a recurring task in HubSpot to review and update your most important "answer" content every quarter.
• Test 5 Core Prompts: Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity five questions that you want to be the answer for. Document the sources they cite to understand your competition and identify new opportunities for digital PR and content partnerships.

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Conclusion: Make Your Brand 'AI-Answerable'

Answer Engine Optimisation isn’t a passing trend - it’s the next stage in how people discover, evaluate, and trust brands online. The businesses that win in this new landscape will be those that make their expertise easy for AI to find, understand, and quote.

By structuring your content clearly and building an intentional AEO strategy within HubSpot, you can turn your website into a genuine source of truth - one that answer engines rely on when your future customers ask the questions that matter.

At Growth London, we can help you take the first step. Our team will benchmark your current AEO visibility, identify how you’re being represented in AI answers today, and then design a tailored roadmap for implementing our HubSpot-specific 12-step AEO framework inside your portal.

If you’re ready to make your brand AI-answerable, get in touch - and we’ll show you exactly where you stand and how to move ahead with confidence.