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HubSpot builds answer engine optimization into its platform
HubSpot's AEO, designed to help marketers navigate the world of AI search, is the biggest of several spring product drops.
HubSpot today released new agentic capabilities for marketing, customer service and sales, led by answer engine optimization tools built from its acquisition of XFunnel.
AEO is the practice of optimizing content for AI search, increasingly common with Google Gemini, OpenAI ChatGPT and Perplexity. As many media players have learned, marketers have seen website traffic drop since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022. AEO helps users establish authority in a topical area and, when done well, move a company's content into works-cited lists for AI summaries -- so when someone bypasses search engine results and reads just a summary, the company's content is there.
A host of companies, including Adobe, Semrush (which Adobe acquired), Clearscope and Profound have released AEO tools. HubSpot's features technology from XFunnel, which it acquired late last year. With an interface tuned to the needs of marketers for HubSpot's customer base -- which includes some enterprises but is concentrated in the small- to medium-sized business space -- HubSpot AEO begins with a few questions about a user's business.
In the course of a few screens, HubSpot AEO uses generative AI to research the company's existing content, its competitors' content, and the prompts driving traffic to everyone's content in AI search. Then it offers to use generative AI to create site content that is likely to fill gaps and establish a HubSpot user's authority in those AI searches. AI search must accommodate prospective customers in all buying phases, not just focusing on one part of the sales funnel as traditional content might have in the past, said Beeri Amiel, director of Product Development at HubSpot and co-founder of XFunnel.
"The core of AEO is understanding what the answer engines know about you," Amiel said. "We're trying to get data from as many places as possible to help us to really try to understand what questions customers would ask answer engines about your products, about your brand ... we ask questions across different parts of the buying journey, so that we can help ChatGPT and [Anthropic's] Claude answer the questions that customers might have in the awareness phase, consideration phase or decision phase."
HubSpot AEO is integrated into Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise subscriptions. It is also available as a standalone subscription for $50 per month.
Will AEO render SEO obsolete?
AEO works differently than search engine optimization (SEO) -- writing content to rank high on search-result pages -- and search engine marketing (SEM), which involves buying ad space on markets such as Google Ads that run alongside search results, said Liz Miller, analyst at Constellation Research. SEO is all about content authenticity, while AEO is about authority.
Chances are, both SEO and AEO will remain important initiatives for marketers for the foreseeable future. Some companies might build AEO strategies on a foundation of strong SEO and dial back SEM investments to focus on building authority for AEO on platforms such as Reddit, which answer engines weigh more heavily.
"The two things [SEO and AEO] live side by side," Miller said. "We will see the balance in where the investment goes, but you really have to think about one, the stronger your SEO is consistently maintained, the more it helps your authority grow and build. And two, you have to build on top of it, and your AEO investments are going to need to balance that out."
Amiel holds a similar belief about how SEO feeds into an overall AEO strategy.
"The way answer engines are influenced is by creating consensus across the web; to do that, you have to be able to take action across many channels," Amiel said. "SEO is not going away. But where it was a much bigger component before, it is now just one slice of the pie."
HubSpot AEO debuted in conjunction with the company's Spring Spotlight quarterly releases. These include new integrations and capabilities for Breeze Agent, Prospecting Agent and Customer Agent, as well as new pricing models for the latter two.
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
