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

The way people discover and evaluate businesses has already changed.

For years, organic search meant earning a prominent position in Google and persuading someone to click through to your website. That model still matters, but it now sits alongside another route to discovery: buyers asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI-powered search experiences to research a problem, compare suppliers and recommend what to do next.

This is not a future trend.

At Growth London, we are already seeing the commercial effect. Organic traffic and inbound enquiries from traditional search have fallen as AI-mediated discovery has accelerated. We cannot attribute every lost visit to AI, but the direction of travel is clear: a growing share of the research that once happened on websites is now happening inside an AI-generated answer.

That changes the question marketing teams need to ask.

It is no longer enough to know:

“Do we rank on Google?”

You also need to understand:

“When an AI system answers the questions our buyers ask, does it mention us, cite us and describe us accurately?”

That is the practical purpose of Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO).

And for HubSpot users, AEO has moved quickly from an emerging marketing idea to something you can now measure and operate directly inside HubSpot.

1. What is Answer Engine Optimisation?

Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of improving how your organisation, expertise, products and content appear in AI-generated answers.

You may also hear terms such as Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), AI search optimisation, AI visibility, LLM optimisation or AI SEO. The terminology is still settling.

Rather than becoming too concerned about the acronym, the useful question is whether the AI systems your buyers use can find sufficiently strong evidence to understand your organisation and include it in relevant answers.

Is AEO replacing SEO?

No.

SEO remains one of the foundations of AEO.

Google is particularly explicit about this. Its guidance for AI Overviews and AI Mode says that the same fundamental SEO practices continue to matter and that there are no special technical requirements or special AI schema required to appear in its generative search experiences.

Good technical SEO still matters. Crawlability still matters. Useful content still matters. Internal linking still matters. Original expertise still matters. Authority still matters.

The difference is that marketers now have another layer of visibility to consider.

A page can perform well because someone clicks it from Google. It can also perform a different job by supplying evidence, facts or explanations that an answer engine uses when responding to a potential customer.

A modern content strategy needs to account for both.

2. How answer engines find information

There is no single mechanism used by every answer engine.

Different systems have different indexes, retrieval mechanisms, models and citation behaviours.

Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are closely connected to Google’s existing Search infrastructure. These experiences can use query fan-out, where a complex question results in multiple related searches across different subtopics.

ChatGPT can also retrieve current information from the web. OpenAI advises publishers that allowing OAI-SearchBot to access public content helps that content become discoverable and eligible to appear with citations in ChatGPT search.

Other systems work differently again.

Don’t optimise for one imaginary universal AI crawler

Instead, create content that is accessible, indexable, factually clear, genuinely useful, well structured, supported by evidence, connected logically to the rest of your expertise and, where appropriate, corroborated by trustworthy external sources.

These are useful characteristics regardless of which retrieval system sits behind the answer.

Query fan-out matters

A buyer may ask:

“What is the best CRM for a 50-person B2B SaaS business?”

Behind that question, an answer engine may need to investigate a much wider set of questions: which CRMs are designed for B2B, what works for a company of that size, implementation requirements, pricing, integrations, customer feedback, limitations and trade-offs.

Your content therefore needs enough depth to answer more than one isolated keyword.

This does not mean producing hundreds of tiny artificial content fragments. Clear, self-contained sections are useful because they improve understanding, not because an arbitrary word count supposedly unlocks AI visibility.

3. The big change for HubSpot users: AEO is now built into HubSpot

When we originally wrote this guide, much of the AEO process had to happen outside HubSpot.

That has changed.

HubSpot now includes native AEO functionality that can help teams measure AI visibility, track commercially relevant prompts, analyse citations, compare competitor share of voice and identify practical actions to improve visibility.

For HubSpot customers, this changes the operating model from:

Guess → publish → manually ask an AI assistant → guess again

to:

Measure → investigate → prioritise → improve → measure again

That is a much more useful way to treat AEO.

What HubSpot AEO can help you monitor

• Brand visibility: how frequently your brand appears across tracked prompts.
• Prompt coverage: which commercially relevant questions trigger a mention and which do not.
• Sentiment: how answer engines describe your organisation when they mention it.
• Competitor share of voice: how frequently your brand appears compared with configured competitors.
• Citations: which websites and individual sources answer engines rely on for the prompts you track.
• Recommendations: practical actions based on observed gaps and citation patterns.

HubSpot can also use business context such as your ICPs and products to support prompt tracking and recommendations.

For teams already investing in HubSpot AI and agents, this is an important development: AEO is becoming part of the same operational environment as your content, CRM and AI deployment work.

4. Your practical AEO playbook in HubSpot

1. Start by establishing a real AEO baseline

Before changing your website, understand how your brand currently appears.

Set up HubSpot AEO with accurate information about your brand, common brand-name variations, your main competitors, your products or services and your Ideal Customer Profiles.

Then establish an initial set of prompts.

Do not judge performance from a single test. Generative answers vary. A useful baseline should help you answer:

• How often are we mentioned?
• Which prompts trigger a mention?
• Which engines mention us most frequently?
• Which competitors appear when we do not?
• Which websites are being cited?
• Which pages on our own domain are already being cited?
• How are we being described?

This gives you something much more useful than a generic AEO score: a map of where the real gaps are.

2. Track prompts that reflect real buyer questions

AEO measurement is only useful if you track useful questions.

Avoid building a prompt list entirely around your own brand name.

A prospective customer who already asks “Is Growth London a good HubSpot partner?” is very different from somebody asking “Who can implement HubSpot for a UK professional services company?”

A healthy prompt set should include different stages of the buying journey:

• Awareness: problem-led questions.
• Consideration: category or solution questions.
• Evaluation: comparison and supplier questions.
• Decision: high-intent questions about suitability.

That makes your prompt library much more useful than a list of vanity questions designed simply to make your brand appear.

3. Use citation analysis before deciding what to create

Before assuming that another blog article is the answer, look at what answer engines are actually referencing for the topics you care about.

You may discover that they favour documentation, independent reviews, comparison articles, research, YouTube, Reddit, industry publications or detailed product pages.

That changes the content decision.

If third-party research dominates the citations, another generic article on your own website might not solve the visibility gap. You may need original research or external coverage instead.

If competitors’ product pages are repeatedly cited, your own equivalent pages may lack sufficient clarity or depth.

If Reddit appears frequently, the opportunity may be genuine participation in relevant discussions rather than another SEO landing page.

4. Fix technical discoverability before chasing AEO tricks

AI optimisation does not rescue a site that search engines cannot properly crawl and understand.

Check the basics first:

• important pages can be crawled;
• pages intended for search are indexable;
• canonical tags are sensible;
• important information exists as readable text;
• internal links make important pages discoverable;
• page speed and user experience are reasonable;
• sitemaps are accurate;
• your robots.txt file is intentional rather than accidental.

If visibility in ChatGPT search matters to you, also check that you are not inadvertently blocking OAI-SearchBot.

5. Make important content easy to answer from

“Answer-first” content remains one of the most useful habits from the original version of this guide.

If a section asks “What is HubSpot Smart CRM?”, do not make the reader work through five introductory paragraphs before you answer it.

Give a clear answer first. Then add detail, examples, caveats, evidence and implementation guidance.

Think in terms of complete sections, not arbitrary AI chunks.

A useful section should normally make sense when someone lands directly on it.

6. Cover the complete question, not just the keyword

Traditional keyword thinking can encourage very narrow pages.

AEO should push you towards stronger topical coverage.

If you are writing a guide to HubSpot onboarding, do not stop after defining onboarding. A useful resource might also cover data migration, integrations, user permissions, sales pipelines, marketing setup, reporting, training, common mistakes, internal ownership, timescales and what happens after onboarding.

Ask:

What additional questions would someone need answered before they could make a confident decision?

Then answer those questions well.

7. Use structured data properly — but don’t treat schema as an AEO shortcut

Structured data remains useful.

Depending on the page, you might use appropriate schema for your organisation, articles, products, services, people or breadcrumbs.

But we would now change one important recommendation from the original version of this guide.

FAQ schema is not a magic AEO lever.

Structured data should accurately describe the content users can already see on the page and should primarily be considered part of good search and content hygiene.

By all means create useful FAQ content. Just do it because the questions help your reader and complete the subject — not because adding FAQ markup supposedly guarantees an AI citation.

For practical HubSpot implementation guidance, see our guide: How to Add Schema to Your HubSpot Website (and Why It Matters for AEO).

8. Create strong comparison and evaluation content

AI assistants are extremely useful during evaluation.

People ask questions such as:

• HubSpot or Salesforce?
• Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise?
• Should we use HubSpot or keep Mailchimp and Pipedrive?
• Which CRM works best for our industry?
• Which implementation partner is right for our situation?

If these questions matter commercially, create content that genuinely helps somebody evaluate the choice.

A strong comparison should discuss who each option suits, important differences, trade-offs, implementation implications, cost considerations where appropriate, limitations and situations where you would recommend the alternative.

9. Publish things that add information to the web

If ten websites already contain variations of the same generic advice, an eleventh rewritten version does not add much.

Original material gives both humans and retrieval systems a reason to use your source.

Examples include:

• first-hand implementation lessons;
• customer examples;
• original research;
• benchmarks;
• expert commentary;
• practical templates;
• proprietary data;
• tested processes;
• screenshots showing real implementation;
• detailed technical guides;
• lessons from things that went wrong.

10. Build authority beyond your own website

You cannot control AEO entirely from your CMS.

Answer engines regularly cite third-party sources.

That means digital PR, community participation, partnerships and customer advocacy increasingly sit alongside traditional SEO within the AEO strategy.

The important word is genuine.

Do not turn “Reddit gets cited” into a brief for your marketing team to manufacture promotional Reddit comments.

Instead, contribute expertise where you genuinely have something useful to add, earn customer reviews, pitch useful data and expertise to journalists, contribute to industry discussions, build relationships with relevant publications and publish material worth referencing.

11. Keep important information current — when freshness matters

Content maintenance still matters.

But avoid the simplistic rule that every article needs changing every few months because AI supposedly prefers a particular age of content.

Freshness depends on the subject.

A guide to current HubSpot pricing needs frequent review. A tutorial about a rapidly evolving AI product needs frequent review. A long-standing conceptual explainer may remain accurate for years.

Instead of refreshing content to change the date, review important content for factual accuracy, product changes, outdated screenshots, superseded statistics, broken links, new evidence, missing questions, changed terminology and changes in what your buyers actually ask.

12. Turn AEO into a continuous operating loop

The biggest mistake would be treating AEO as a one-off website project.

A much better operating model is:

Measure → diagnose → prioritise → act → re-measure

HubSpot’s AEO recommendations help formalise much of this process.

In some cases, those recommendations can also feed into HubSpot’s content creation tools. If you are using Content Agent or other credit-consuming AI features, it is worth understanding how that usage fits into your overall account-level credit pool. Our guide Sitting on HubSpot Credits? Here’s What to Do With Them is a useful starting point.

5. Build an accurate first-party source of truth

One useful tactic from the original guide is still worth keeping, but with more nuanced positioning: create a clear, factual page about your organisation.

This is not a magic file for LLMs. It is simply a well-structured, first-party source of truth that explains who you are, what you do, who you serve and how your services fit together.

A useful page might include:

• your company name and description;
• your core services;
• your target markets and ICPs;
• locations served;
• key differentiators;
• important partnerships or credentials;
• links to relevant proof points.

For a practical example of how to approach this in HubSpot, see Build Your ‘AI Info Page’ in HubSpot — a blueprint for AI Engines.

6. Using HubSpot AEO with ChatGPT and other AI assistants

There is another development worth highlighting for HubSpot teams.

HubSpot’s connector can expose AEO information to supported AI assistants, including ChatGPT and Claude.

That means you can work with your HubSpot AEO data conversationally.

For example, you might ask:

• How has our AEO visibility changed this month?
• Which prompts have the weakest visibility?
• Which domains are most frequently cited for our priority prompts?
• Where are our competitors gaining share of voice?
• Which of our owned pages receive the most citations?
• What recommendations currently have the highest priority?

For teams already using ChatGPT alongside HubSpot, this matters.

AEO stops being another dashboard somebody needs to remember to inspect. Instead, the information can become part of your normal content planning, reporting and optimisation workflow.

7. What should you measure?

AEO needs a different scorecard from traditional SEO.

Organic traffic and rankings still matter, but they no longer tell the whole story.

Useful metrics now include:

• Brand visibility: how often your organisation appears across a controlled set of relevant prompts.
• Prompt coverage: the percentage of strategically important buyer questions where your brand appears.
• Citations: how often answer engines use your website as a source.
• Third-party brand mentions: how often cited external sources contain information about your brand.
• Competitor share of voice: how frequently you appear compared with relevant competitors.
• Sentiment and accuracy: how your business is being described.
• AI referral traffic: visitors arriving from answer engines.
• Conversion quality: whether those visitors enquire, register, book meetings or become customers.

Keep AEO visibility metrics and actual business results connected.

It is entirely possible to increase the number of AI mentions without creating any meaningful commercial impact.

The objective is not to win an AEO dashboard. The objective is to become more discoverable and credible when the right buyers are researching a problem you can genuinely solve.

8. What we would no longer recommend

Don’t create content purely for AI

Write useful content for people. Clear structure helps retrieval, but machine-oriented prose normally makes the content worse.

Don’t force every section into an arbitrary word count

There is no magic 100-word or 150-word chunk size. Explain the subject properly.

Don’t assume schema guarantees AI visibility

Structured data remains useful, but there is no special AEO schema that guarantees inclusion in AI-generated answers.

Don’t add an llms.txt file just because someone says you need one

Treat new technical conventions on their evidence. Do not implement them simply because they are fashionable.

Don’t manufacture Reddit posts or external mentions

If third-party communities matter in your market, participate in them genuinely.

Don’t rely on one manual ChatGPT search as your AEO benchmark

Generative answers vary. Track a consistent prompt set over time instead.

Don’t abandon SEO

The technical and editorial foundations of good search optimisation remain highly relevant to AI-driven discovery.

9. A practical starting plan for HubSpot users

1. Configure HubSpot AEO. Confirm your brand, competitors, products and ICPs.
2. Choose your priority prompts. Start with commercially meaningful awareness, consideration, evaluation and decision questions.
3. Establish your baseline. Allow enough runs to understand your normal visibility rather than reacting to one result.
4. Inspect the citations. Look at who and what answer engines already trust for those questions.
5. Audit your existing content. Identify the pages that should logically answer those questions.
6. Check the technical foundations. Crawlability, indexability, internal linking, structured data, canonicals, sitemaps and robots controls still matter.
7. Pick a small number of meaningful gaps. Perhaps one important service page, one comparison page, one detailed guide and one external authority opportunity.
8. Make the changes. Create something genuinely better than what already exists.
9. Review the effect. Monitor visibility, mentions and citations over subsequent AEO runs.
10. Repeat. AEO is an optimisation discipline, not a one-time implementation.

Conclusion: AEO is already part of modern search

Answer Engine Optimisation is not a future consideration. It is already part of how people discover, compare and evaluate businesses.

The practical challenge is not to chase every new AEO tactic. It is to make your expertise easier to find, understand and trust wherever buyers are asking questions.

That means creating things worth citing, explaining your expertise clearly, making important content easy to discover, answering the questions your buyers really ask, building credible evidence about your organisation on and beyond your own website, and measuring what answer engines actually do rather than assuming you know.

For HubSpot users, this is becoming much easier to operate.

HubSpot’s native AEO tooling now gives marketing teams a way to track prompts, monitor brand visibility, analyse citations, compare competitors and turn those observations into specific recommendations inside the same platform they already use to manage content, CRM and marketing.

At Growth London, we help HubSpot teams turn that into a practical programme: establishing the AEO baseline, deciding which questions matter, identifying visibility and citation gaps, improving the underlying content and technical setup, and measuring what changes.

If you want to understand how your brand currently appears in AI search — and what you can realistically do about it inside HubSpot — get in touch.