Time to talk about HubSpot updates! 3/5/2026

Wake up, Customer Platform. The tools are at your hand. No need to sleep on capabilities that can help your business stand. The answer's right before your eyes. You just need to realize. Wake up, Customer Platform, and watch your business rise. Wake up, wake up. The platform's waiting for you.

Good morning, HubSpot Nation. It is time to wake up customer platform with your unofficial HubSpot Updates Morning Show, where we help you discover the platform value you already own I'm Chris Carroll, joined by my co-hosts Casey Hawkins and George B. Thomas. We're here every weekday morning to make sure you're not sleeping on HubSpot's true capabilities. If you're joining live, drop a hello in the comments and let us know what you're building in HubSpot today. Happy Thursday, March 5th.

Happy Thursday.

Happy Thursday. I like to be honest, and I feel like I've been catching up from Monday all week. But I stayed up till 1 AM last night and I'm feeling like I'm back.

There you go.

All right. Well, hopefully you guys don't hear the lawnmower that's right outside my window right now.

Your mic setup's great.

Yeah, I don't hear it.

I'm gonna do my best to continue through this situation. And let's get to some updates. Share my screen here. We've got AEO. Create a blog post from a recommendation. What is it? You can now generate an AEO-optimized blog article. Directly from a visibility recommendation, making it easy to create well-structured content designed to close answer engine visibility gaps. This feature currently generates listicle-style articles, example, top 10 or best tools for, a format commonly surfaced in AI-generated responses. Over time, support will expand to additional content types.

Why does it matter? The AEO tool shows you where your brand is lacking visibility in answer engines. Previously, you had to manually apply recommendations into new content and figure out how to structure it to actually improve answer engine visibility. This feature removes that friction. With just a few clicks, you can turn AEO recommendations into ready-to-edit blog posts that are already structured for answer engine optimization. It helps you move from insights to impact faster. I would like to ask George a question about AEO. Yeah. Which is going to show how little I know about AEO. But is the, so the, what this is saying is they're helping you find places where AIO, where AI tools, or could AI tools could recommend your article?

Yeah, so, well, so here's the thing. If you go, well, if you get into this beta, and also I think there's a beta previous to this one as well, but if you get into this beta, in your content tab, Casey, there will be a search strategy. It used to be called SEO, and you'd click on it and it'd go to like the pillar page topics tool and cluster topic clusters, but it's now called Search Strategy. And what they give you is there's a dashboard which it talks about brand visibility, and brand visibility reveals when and how AI models talk about your brand. And what it allows you to do is track the when and how of your brand and its mentions across major AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, so on and so forth. So that we as marketers, business owners, whatever, can understand the presence that we have in AI generation. There's a dashboard, there's literally a prompts tab, there's citations tab, and there's a recommendations tab, which is new. And then now based on what you're reading or based on this update, because of the recommendations, you're going to be able to create content to fill the gap. What's really nice about when you set it up, there's like a competitor's landscape. And so for me, I can look at, um, share of voice, it's called in here. So like I might be looking at maybe Aptitude8, Blue Leads, New Breed, Smart Buck Media, like, and be able to look at them as well.

Yeah, yeah, a large, a large presence.

Yeah, yeah. So, um, so yeah, it's, it's a very interesting set of tools that they're building around AEO. And what's nice is now it's like AEO is a tab, by the way, it's the first tab. Pay attention to that. And the second tab is SEO. But they're all in the same place.

Chris, am I going to ruin your life if I suggest we go to the last update just so we're talking about it all together?

The one that I have up on the screen right now? Sure.

Oh, you and I, you know what, we don't even, we don't even have to talk anymore. It's just the brain laser.

Uh, closely related, maybe the parent update of the one that we just, uh, read. Um, AEO track and improve your brand visibility in AI-powered search. What is it? HubSpot's new AEO, Answer Engine Optimization tool, lets you measure, track, and improve your brand's visibility in answer engines like ChatGPT, all in one place.

Why does it matter? How people discover brands is changing. Instead of clicking through traditional search results, buyers are increasingly asking questions directly in answer engines and trusting the answers they get. These AI responses often summarize the market, recommend vendors, and cite sources before a customer even visits a website. The challenge: you can be doing great SEO and still be invisible in AI-generated answers. The AEO tool helps you close that gap by giving you visibility into a channel that's otherwise a black box. Just as SEO tools help marketers adapt to traditional search engines, AEO helps you adapt to AI-driven discovery with real data And now actionable recommendations to improve your results.

Yep. Everything George just said.

I was going to say, I think if I had read this, I wouldn't have made George.

And I think we need to come up with like 10 more acronyms and phrases as various ways to describe what we're trying to do here. We'll leave that for another day. Yeah, get some help getting found in your AI friends. But if you see a bunch of answers turning into listicle answers, you might now know why. Find reports you're not using. What is it? A view in your reports list that shows reports that haven't been viewed in 6 months or more.

Why does it matter? If you're managing a growing collection of reports, it's hard to know which ones are still relevant. Unused reports clutter your list and make it harder for you and your team to find reports you actually need. With this view, you can identify and delete reports that are no longer useful and keep your report list focused on what you actively use.

Very nice.

Enhanced frozen columns. Mm, it's a good one. Is it? We've upgraded our table experience to give you total control over how you view your data. You can now freeze as many columns as you need to keep your most important information in sight. We've also made it much more intuitive. Simply drag and drop any column into the frozen area. To lock it in place instantly.

Why does it matter? Every workflow is unique, and we don't believe your tools should limit how you organize your data. Whether you need to see 2 columns or 10 while you scroll, you now have the flexibility to build the exact view you need. This update is part of our ongoing commitment to quality, ensuring our tables are not only more powerful, but also easier and more natural to use. Just a quick note, if you heard my brain break, it was because workflow in this case means the flow of the work you're doing, not the workflow tool. And I thought I was on the wrong update for a moment.

I got to— I was playing with this just yesterday, the drag and drop into the frozen zone. Very, very cool. Revert to prior revision in workflows and send from Outlook aliases. We touched both of those earlier this week. Weren't— we were gonna do yesterday, but I had to cancel. So I've got a list from yesterday that is no longer on the new to you page, but we're gonna click over to the all section. TikTok Ads integration is on that list. Connect your TikTok Ads account to see all your ad data, attribution, and audiences in one place.

Why does it matter? TikTok is the fastest growing ads channel, and short-form video drives the highest marketing ROI. Managing it separately means missing unified attribution and first-party data sync.

Unifying reply recommendations and customer agent. This is a major update alert, George.

Oh man, I wasn't ready. Dang on it, I forgot that I did that one day and everybody loved it. Hang on, hang on, give me one second. We have a major update, ladies and gentlemen. All right, there we go.

I do really like it.

I gotta get more prepared for that one. I gotta remember that. Put that in the memory banks.

All right, that's your.md file.

Okay, here we go.

Editing memory. Okay, uh, back.

What's offering?

Warping?

This is getting real nerdy.

Oh, okay. What's changed with this update? Updated migration details. If you use reply recommendations but not customer agent, a customer agent will be automatically created for your portal on March 10th, including default settings and access to a smarter model. This migration consolidates settings and it does not activate an autonomous customer agent. Reply recommendations do not consume credits. What is it? We're unifying reply recommendations and customer agent into a single cohesive experience. This update includes reply recommendation setup now lives within the customer agent app. A streamlined rep experience in helpdesk with an improved reply flow, higher quality recommendations, more personal, thorough, and accurate.

Why does it matter? The challenge: support teams need a— need to move faster without sacrificing quality or control. The solution: reply recommendations give reps AI-powered recommendations that keep humans in the loop. Review, edit, and send. Reps stay in control while moving significantly faster. Why now? Reply recommendations and Customer Agent already share the same knowledge sources. This update makes it easier to get immediate value from Customer Agent without deploying a live autonomous agent. It's a low-risk entry point that lets teams respond quickly and close tickets faster, deploy AI assistance without going fully autonomous. Build confidence in AI outputs through hands-on experience, improve answer quality over time as your team refines content sources, and manage everything from a unified admin experience.

A lot of things coming to mind here, George. Um, reading between the lines. While your human agents and your customer agent probably do already share the same knowledge sources, they might not have the same instructions or guidelines. If we put a lot of work into building out the customer agent and maybe everybody else's instructions and guidelines are based on their lived experience with less documentation to draw from. Um, and this, like, I'm just envisioning, like, instead of the customer agent working over here and our humans working over here, now everybody's working together. We got customer agent right there with us, like, hey George, seeing this come in, you might want to do this or this, or this is what happened last time when we did it like this.

Yep.

Um, but Team working together. Love it. Got brand support and invoices, payment links, subscriptions, and credit memos. Uh, if you have the Brands add-on, you can assign different brands to invoices, payment links, subscriptions, and checkout pages in Commerce Hub, so each transaction reflects the correct logo and brand colors.

Why does it matter? Businesses with multiple brands need to present the correct branding throughout the buyer journey, avoiding confusion and maintaining a professional Appearance. Brand support provides a cohesive buyer journey from marketing to sales to payments.

This should be a major update, George, but it does not have the tag. I won't ask you to do it.

Yeah, I mean, it should be updated.

Customer portal powered by CMS is in private beta. What is it? We're upgrading the customer portal to run on the CMS app, giving you a faster and more seamless experience. This change was driven by a few factors, including strong customer demand for more flexibility and branding control of their portal experience. This update will eventually unlock access to HubSpot CMS capabilities. All within a unified environment. It also enables additional use cases in the customer portal beyond ticketing. Along with the total redesign, you'll notice new features in the new version, such as multiple conversations, view all conversation threads connected to a ticket in the portal, sort and filter organizing ticket data for viewing and reporting, improved search, lookup information and subject, ticket ID and description, and new design layouts including collapsible panels for ticket details and attachments, as well as column resizing for clients in the portal.

Why does it matter? Moving to the CMS App Platform gives us the speed, design flexibility, and extensionability, extensionability? They, they making up words needed to create a quick branded experience. It's an experience most customers are familiar with and can navigate much more easily. This new experience also lays the foundation for future cross-hub customer journeys, enabling a unified self-service experience that goes beyond ticket management to include other use cases.

Others getting there, step in the right direction. Uh, we'll go ahead and check it out. Um, but tell me, George, uh, where can I find the CMS app in HubSpot?

The CMS app? I mean, it, it's basically talking about the CMS tools, and they're using the internal.

Yeah. So if you're not sure what CMS app means, come over to content and basically website pages, landing pages, blog, like that's where you find CMS tooling.

George hated that you put him on the spot like that so much.

Yeah.

He was like, Chris, I'm tired of you putting me on the spot.

Right. Yeah, I just want better words to be used, like CMS app. Nobody calls it that. Nobody knows what that means. Anything CMS hub, which we don't want them calling it that because it's Content Hub. Let's see what else we might have from the list yesterday that is new. I think this one is new. Rotate record to owner action in conversation-based workflows. Uh, what is it? We're extending the existing rotate owner action to work in conversation-based workflows. The rotate record to owner action automatically moves a conversation to another inbox and assigns it to the right person or team based on who has access to that inbox. It brings a structured automated handoff experience similar to rotate owner for CRM objects to conversations while fully respecting inbox permissions.

Why does it matter? Support teams often rely on workflow-based handoffs to move conversations between tiers, specialist groups, or from automation to a human agent. This new action gives your team the ability to automate conversation handoffs between inboxes, ensure conversations only route to users who can respond, keep ownership aligned with the right team as workflows progress, and standardize the way handoff work— handoffs work across your support process. This result is clearer ownership, faster responses, and more efficient Conversation management.

Remember folks, you probably already own the solution you're looking for in HubSpot. Sometimes you just need to wake up to it. Join us tomorrow morning live at 7:30 AM Central, or catch us anytime on Spotify, Apple Music, or the Brownlee HubSpot Updates blog. Drop your biggest takeaway in the comments and let us know what capabilities you want to wake up to next. Until then, I'm Chris Carroll.

I'm Casey Hawkins.

And this has been Wake Up Customer Platform. Now go build something amazing. Have a great day, everybody.

Wake up, Customer Platform, it's time to start the day. Discover all the value you already own, don't let solutions slip away. Wake up, Customer Platform, the tools are at your hand. No need to sleep on capabilities that can help your business. The answer's right before your eyes. You just need to realize. Wake up, wake up, Customer Platform, and watch your business rise. Wake up, wake up, the platform's waiting for you. Wake up. Wake up, wake up, see what your system can do.