How to Set Up AEO in HubSpot and Get Found in AI Search

Hey Hub Heroes, this is Jorge Fuentes from the Sidekick Strategies team. And today we're going to take a look at how to set up the new AEO tool in HubSpot. Check it out. So we're going to log into HubSpot and on the left-hand side, you'll notice that if we go to the marketing section, we now have AEO as a beta. So let's click on that and let's actually start creating our account here. I'm actually just going to go ahead and type Sidekick Strategies here, and I'm going to change the website to also be sidekickstrategies.com. Com. There we go. Now I'm going to just click on getting started. And the AEO of HubSpot is going to be analyzing my brand data, getting the info from my website, identifying competitors, doing a little bit of deep research on my audience and business. And it's doing that right now as we speak. And then we'll just wait a little bit in order to see the results. And there we go. So now the first thing that it gave me is the, you know, asking me to confirm some of the brand details, right? So I can actually add some brand name variations. In this particular case, it says add any alternate names, acronyms, etc. You can add them later from settings in dashboard. Right now we just have Sidekick Strategies, Sidekick Strategies, and Sidekick Strategies spelled differently. I don't see this variation here, so I'm actually just going to add it in here with capital S's only. Then let's actually just do SS as well. Then in the last thing we're going to do, I think that's pretty much it. Let's actually do just do that. We are a B2B, but do know that you can confirm your business type as well. Let's click on Next here. And now it's going to be identifying some of my competitors. Keep in mind, since this is at a high level, it is identifying our website, our offering, etc. It is definitely just going to throw out the competitors that it believes are our competitors based on that particular brand. The brand details that we provided to it. In this particular case, it did provide a list of competitors. SmartBug Media, Media Junction, Simple Strat, Webcam Poise Studio, Fulius, Digitopia, Straight Growth, and so on and so forth. Now, I can actually do two things from here. I can track and add the same competitors or add more competitors. If I click on Add More Competitors, it will prompt me to manually add a new competitor. I won't do it right now. But let's just track the these 7 competitors and click Track and Add 7 Competitors. There we go. Now the next step in the AEO visibility section right here that we're setting up, we will have to be reviewing the products and ICPs, right? So below here, we're going to see a list of products and ICPs that have been determined for our brand, right? And in order for us to get started, we can choose 1 product and ICP, and the AEO from HubSpot is going to be generating prompts based on my selection, right? So in this particular case, I'm going to stick with one thing, which is going to be the HubSpot implementation product. And then I want my ICP to be, in this particular case, yes, the US. And I'm going to choose small financial services firms in this particular case. That's, that's all I'm going to go for right now. Do know that I can add more products, more ICPs, and so on and so forth. Right now, I'm just going to select one, which is HubSpot implementation for small financial services firms in the US. And I'm going to click continue. Answer great. It is generating, yes, understanding the product, generating the prompts, analyzing the ICPs, and so on and so forth. And here are a few. So you can actually see these prompts are AI search queries related to our product services and ICPs. And these are questions that our potential customers might be asking answer engines while researching solutions like mine or like yours in this particular case. Right? So what does that mean and how is that helpful? Basically, the AEO tool in HubSpot just gave me prompts according to questions that my ICP might be asking the AI. And that is great because now I have a lot of more, let's say, content ideas that I can produce. So in this particular case, you can see some of the prompts. Why do financial firms struggle with CRM and marketing automation software? It tells me where in the world actually that is being asked. Since we defaulted to the US, the location across the board is the US. But also you can see this very helpful column here, which is the buyer journey phase. Now that is great because this is telling me if I optimize for this particular prompt, I'm going to be for the most part helping with the awareness stage. Then I'm going to be helping with the consideration stage with these others right here and so on and so forth. If we had a couple more prompts, Ryan, I could add more prompts. And then just try to add in some details as per my ideal customer persona, ideal customer profile, and then the buyer phase, I could say decision or evaluation. The AEO of HubSpot would be able to pull that up for me. And I can actually also bulk upload a couple of prompts right here if I were to generate them on my own. This is all manual addition. But right now I'm fine with the ones that HubSpot gave us. So we're going to track these prompts and I'm going to say add and track 10 prompts. Those 10 prompts would seem to be great. And now the AEO is going to be analyzing my prompts. So it's running the prompts through the AI engines, analyzing citations that influence AI answers, which is great. And it's going to be setting up my AEO dashboard in just a little bit. And that's pretty much it. So now all set. We're now going to get started with our AEO section. So imagine, you know, a potential customer asking ChatGPT, what's the best CRM for WordPress companies? And the answer, that comes back, shapes how buyers discover and evaluate your business. So this is just a little bit of the description of what we're getting. And let's actually close this out and take a look at our dashboard right now. So you can actually see a couple of things. It's still analyzing the prompts. Please note that the data, it's still processing. It will be refreshed once all the prompts are processed. But you can actually see a couple of things here. So we can actually get our brand metrics, our brand visibility gauge here, our brand visibility over time, depending on the model, the LLM, ChatGPT, Gemini, perplexity. And then also the competitor landscape and how kind of how they are, you know, ranking, how they're being visible, right? Like, for example, SmartBug Media, which is getting, you know, a large percentage of the visibility there. It's at 13% of that visibility here, at least within today's range, which is the only thing that's selected. But that's pretty great to know. And then as far as citation analysis right here, this is, you know, kind of like what AI engines will be referencing when generating the answers. You can actually see the top domains that are being used to be referenced in AI-generated answers. The citations by channel. Okay, so what are the channels that are driving the most citations for your tracked prompts? That's pretty much it. Whether that's earned media, peer review site, user-generated content, and so on and so forth. And then you can actually see citations with brand mention rate versus competitors. This is how we compare to the competitor. In this particular case, Marbuck Media versus Hacking Strategies. And that's pretty much it. There's a lot that we can do with that information. And this was not available before. So this is a great new tool. And actually, you can take a look at the prompts. So they're still processing. They'll be ready in a little bit, but they're still processing. We can actually take a look at the citation section as well with a couple more reports on the dashboard, such as citation by content type. Citations by channel, and so on and so forth. And it was that we took a look at before as well. And then some of the recommendations, which is great. Right now, the recommendations are in progress. HubSpot is analyzing the prompts to identify highest impact recommendations. But right now, this is pretty great. So we are focusing on that. There's a lot that we can do with these prompts if we select them, such as editing them, editing the phase, deleting them, and so on and so forth. And even if we just click 1 right there, you can actually see in here dimensions across the board that we get if and when we get it, that our brand will get in either ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini. And I think that's pretty great. It also provides a prompt analysis and even more recommendations once it actually completes the processing of those particular prompts. But this overall tool is great. It is the next step forward for anybody has HubSpot, you know, using, using HubSpot for creating content, which is pretty much almost anybody that uses it for marketing purposes. This new AEO tool is the next leap in actually being remaining or becoming competitive in the answer engine optimization landscape. And that's pretty much it. So that's how you get started with setting up your AEO engine. Keep in mind that you can keep adding more prompts to it, you can manually at them, you can have it do a little bit of more research of those prompts. If you choose a different ICP, if you choose a different location, if you also, you can then actually select the particular phase that they might be on, not only awareness or consideration, but maybe evaluation and decision. So all of these things can still be iterated way after you've actually set it up initially, such as we did in this video. Remember, education is great, but the execution is where it's at, so go out there and be the Hub Hero that your organization needs to be.