Over the past six months, almost every client conversation has ended up in the same place sooner or later: “So what about AI search? Does ChatGPT even know we exist?” We hear these questions so often that we decided to put them all in one place and answer them honestly, without the marketing fluff.
I’m Max, Front-end Lead at Grow. I’ve been working on the web for more than 15 years, and SEO has always been part of the job: first, as part of the development process (good semantics that Google loves), and then as part of optimizations based on client requests. And now, SEO efforts are being carried out in combination with AEO. I’ve compiled the 16 questions clients ask me most often, and answer them honestly — not with stock phrases from courses that you can find on your own (though, just to be clear, I should mention that I’m a certified HubSpot specialist in both SEO and AEO).
I’ve kept the questions close to how clients actually ask them and grouped them into four parts: what AEO is, how it works in HubSpot, what the work involves, and how to measure results.
And yes, this article follows the rules of AEO itself: a short, direct answer first, details after. That makes it easier for you, and for AI search engines.
No. AEO doesn’t replace SEO, it builds on top of it. SEO still gets you found in regular search results. AEO gets you mentioned in the answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
But you can’t afford to ignore AEO anymore. According to HubSpot, organic traffic for its customers dropped 27% year over year: more and more people get their answer straight from AI and never click through. If you’re not in that answer, you’re not in the running.
And it’s not just HubSpot seeing this. SparkToro found that in 2026, 68% of Google searches in the US end without a click to any website (source). Ahrefs analyzed 300,000 keywords and found that the #1 result gets a 58% lower click-through rate when an AI Overview appears above it (source). And Pew Research found that people click a regular result almost half as often when an AI summary is shown: 8% vs 15% (source).
The click didn’t disappear, though. It moved. AI names its sources, and brands cited inside AI answers get noticeably more clicks than those that only rank below them. So the goal is no longer just to rank. It’s to become the source Google and AI assistants trust enough to quote.
AEO (answer engine optimization) is the work of making sure AI assistants know your brand, describe it accurately and recommend it when users ask questions.
Picture a potential client asking ChatGPT: “Which agency can help us implement HubSpot?” AEO is about whether you show up in that answer, and what gets said about you.
We test this on ourselves, by the way. Poland has more than ten HubSpot partners at Platinum level or higher, yet when someone asks about a HubSpot partner in Poland, Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT most often cite our pages. And for some queries it is only ours.
You may also have come across other names: GEO (generative engine optimization), AIO (AI optimization) or simply AI SEO. In practice, they all mean the same thing. The difference is mostly historical: “AEO” dates back to voice assistants and Google’s answer boxes, while GEO and AIO arrived with ChatGPT. HubSpot uses AEO, so I do too. If an agency pitches you “GEO,” it’s the same work.
You don’t have to choose: they’re two sides of the same strategy. They differ in their goals and in the signals that matter.
|
SEO |
AEO |
|
|---|---|---|
|
Goal |
A position in search results |
A mention or recommendation in an AI answer |
|
Main outcome |
A click to your website |
Your brand named in the answer, sometimes with a link |
|
What drives it |
Keywords, links, technical health |
Your website content plus reviews, media, social and third-party mentions |
|
How it’s measured |
Rankings, traffic, CTR |
Share of mentions, sentiment, citations |
The key difference: in SEO, you mostly work on your own website. In AEO, what others say about you matters a lot: reviews, comparisons, articles, profiles on industry platforms.
But in the end, it all comes down to the same thing: answering the specific question that a person is interested in. That’s why we plan SEO and AEO together rather than as two separate projects. For a more detailed comparison with HubSpot examples, see our SEO & AEO for HubSpot page.
Does it really work that way? Yes. Here's an example: three years ago, I wrote a practical article that is still cited by AI when it comes to questions about multilingual websites on HubSpot.
So if you ask Google something like:
How do I build a multilingual website using a single HubDB table?
You would probably see my article:
Or if you would ask:
How do I fix the ?hsLang URL parameter showing up on my internal HubSpot website links?
You'll get a result like this:
To put it simply, the answer is “no.” It’s a pretty common misconception that you can rewrite the entire page’s content to match the FAQ, put it at the bottom, and everything will be fine. In reality, it’s quite the opposite. Duplicate content can dilute your SEO, and your AEO will take a hit as well. But if you already have a good article that gets straight to the point and helps explain and expand on a particular topic, then the FAQ can actually help it by filling in any minor gaps.
For example, the article above doesn't have a FAQ, and yet it ranks quite well with AI. So the question still comes down to whether the content is relevant and useful, rather than simply rewriting everything to fit a question-and-answer format.
Adding to the collection — here are a few more misconceptions I hear quite often:
In April 2026, HubSpot launched a dedicated tool called HubSpot AEO. It shows how your brand appears in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and recommends what to improve (HubSpot announcement).
What’s inside:
Those last two are the main difference from standalone trackers: your customer data and your content tools already live in the same system.
Here’s what it looks like. You add a prompt, for example: partner for hubspot cms in poland and tool shows you the result:
The percentage means how often your brand was mentioned for this request. As we see, Grow Poland was mentioned only 33% of the time (in this case, by just one of the three AI tools). At the same time, if you check the results yourself, you’ll see the tool isn’t always 100% accurate. For example it treats GROW Poland and Grow Poland as two different companies. Example on the screen: Perplexity lists GROW Poland first, yet the tool reports that Grow Poland wasn’t mentioned:
Same thing in Gemini. But the tool is still in Beta, so let's wait for updates.
And by the way, a client asked me a question I found interesting myself: why there is no Google AI Overview in HubSpot AEO Tool?
Answer here is quite simple: Google AI Overview is not a chat-bot (even if it looks like this). In other words, the HubSpot AEO tool communicates directly with AI assistants, whereas Google's AI Overview is a traditional SEO search that is simply processed through AI.
AEO Grader is a free, one-time check from HubSpot. Enter your brand, industry and location, and within a couple of minutes you get a score out of 100 based on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini (AEO Grader).
The score is made up of five parts: sentiment (up to 40 points), presence quality (20), brand recognition (20), share of voice (10) and market position (10).
How to read it:
One thing to keep in mind: the Grader is a snapshot of right now. It doesn’t show trends, and it won’t reflect recent news the models don’t know about yet. For ongoing tracking, you need HubSpot AEO itself.
No. AEO as an approach works on any platform, and there are other monitoring tools out there. But HubSpot makes it easier.
There are two ways to get the tool: it’s built into Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise, and standalone HubSpot AEO costs $50 a month (or $45 per month when billed annually). If you’re already on HubSpot, the big advantage is the CRM connection: you see not just mentions, but which leads came from AI channels and whether they turned into deals.
A separate note on websites built on HubSpot CMS. A lot of the SEO basics come out of the box: SSL, a global CDN, responsive templates, an automatic XML sitemap and built-in SEO recommendations. What HubSpot won’t do for you: plan your site structure, write content that answers your customers’ real questions, or set up structured data beyond the defaults. That’s exactly where most HubSpot websites lose visibility.
AEO comes down to four areas: diagnostics, on-site content, third-party mentions and the technical side.
On top of that comes regular monitoring: we track what’s changed and adjust the plan. For more on the HubSpot CMS issues we fix most often, see our SEO & AEO for HubSpot page.
As for reviews and social media, of course, we can handle that (and the Dalmeс case confirms that we know what we're talking about), but still, you need to understand that in addition to a polished marketing image, there also need to be genuine reviews.
You can, but AI handles execution, not strategy. It can write copy, suggest a page structure or markup, and some of your metrics may even go up. The real question is different: will it bring you the people who actually buy?
AI doesn’t know your business the way you do. It doesn’t know which services have your best margins, who your ideal client is, what objections come up on sales calls, what genuinely sets you apart from competitors, or what’s in your CRM. Without that context, you get optimization that’s “average for the market.”
There’s also an almost paradoxical reason. Answer engines prefer to cite sources that add something new: original data, case studies, expert opinion. Text that AI assembled from what it already knows gives it nothing new, so there’s no reason to cite it. In other words, content written by AI “for AI” performs worst in AI. On top of that, everyone is producing this kind of content right now, and it all sounds the same.
We use AI in our work every day, but as hands, not as a head. The context, the direction and the understanding of why you’re doing all this should stay with someone who knows your business and knows what they’re doing.
Start with the free AEO Grader: in a couple of minutes you’ll see how AI describes you today. It’s a good baseline.
Next, list 10–20 questions your customers ask before they buy. Your sales team, client emails and CRM are the best places to find them. Then check what AI answers to those questions and who it names. The gap between “who it names” and “who it should name” is your first action plan.
As an example, I can point to our onboarding page, which had information that was a little out of date (that happens when you're busy with something else). The page's visibility wasn't exactly poor, no, it was totally zero. We looked at what we wanted to change and made the updates. The result wasn't far behind:
Even though the starting point wasn't exactly very high, the result is quite satisfactory – a 3,488% increase in page impressions. So it's never too late to get started.
No. We usually start with 5–10 key pages: services, products, pricing, comparisons and your most-visited blog posts. We improve those, and write new content in an AI-friendly format from the start.
A full rewrite is rarely needed. More often, it’s enough to add direct answers, specifics and structure to what’s already there.
And no, you don’t have to write it all yourselves. We can take the content off your hands, prepare detailed briefs for your team, or combine both. Either way, the content follows the strategy and works for both search engines and AI.
It’s ongoing work with a clear starting project. The first three stages usually take 2–3 months:
Exact timelines depend on the size of your website, your industry and how much has already been written about you online. For ongoing work, we plan for at least 6 months: it’s hard to see a stable trend in less time than that.
AEO matters most when your customers take their time choosing and comparing: B2B, SaaS, professional services, high-ticket products. These are exactly the decisions where people increasingly ask AI for advice.
According to HubSpot, 42% of buyers researching its products used an AI assistant at some point (source).
It’s too early if your website lacks basic SEO, there’s almost nothing about your company publicly available, or your customers buy on impulse without researching first. In that case, get the basics in order first.
The first changes in mentions usually show up within 1–3 months, with a stable effect after 3–6 months.
Speed depends on the model. Systems that search the web in real time (Perplexity, for example) pick up new content faster. But there’s a general pattern: AI visibility tends to follow SEO. Technical fixes can show an effect within a few weeks, meaningful growth in rankings and traffic usually takes 3–6 months, and longer for competitive topics. AI assistants largely rely on pages that search engines already trust, so growth in AI follows growth in search.
There are three levels. The first is checking manually: ask AI your key questions and look at the answers. It’s free, but subjective, and answers change from one try to the next.
The second is a one-time check with AEO Grader. The third is ongoing monitoring in HubSpot AEO: it regularly checks your chosen questions in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and shows the trend over time.
The key metrics:
Yes, though not as directly as with paid ads. Some people click through from AI to your website, and that traffic can be tracked in your analytics and CRM. Others see your name in the answer and come back later directly or through branded search.
That’s why we look at several signals together: AI referral traffic and its conversion rate, growth in direct and branded traffic. You can also add a simple “How did you hear about us?” question on your forms with a “ChatGPT / AI assistant” option.
The case studies in HubSpot’s announcement show the effect can be significant. Docebo gets nearly 15% of its leads from AI traffic, and Sandler drove 8,000 new website visitors and 12 new account conversions in just a few weeks (HubSpot announcement).
Since these were answers to the most frequently asked questions, I don't think a separate summary is necessary here. However, to put it briefly: AEO doesn’t replace SEO, and it doesn’t mean rebuilding your entire marketing. But your customers are already asking AI assistants for advice, and if you’re not in the answers, the decision gets made without you.
The good news: you can start small. Check how AI sees you today, pick a dozen of your customers’ most important questions, and improve a few key pages. You’ll see the first changes within a couple of months. All the details are on our SEO & AEO for HubSpot page or just contact us. And if your question isn’t on this list, drop us a line. It might just become number seventeen.