AEO is the practice of improving how often and how accurately your brand appears in answers when prospective customers use AI Engines like ChatGPT to do their research.
A good AEO strategy helps surface your brand in AI Engine answers to questions such as "W
According to Hubspot, 2026, 42% of buyers now use AI search as part of their evaluation process and AI search is the top predictor of purchase intent.
Your efforts for SEO were not wasted. SEO gets you ranked in a list of links.
AEO is about being named and mentioned when an AI engine answers a question. AEO gets you sited in that AI answer. Your goal is to be one of those named options and trusted sources.
The engines that matter are ChatGPT, Google AI, Claude, Grok, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity.
What are Best Practices for AEO?
1) Question-Based Headings: Structure your content to directly answer the specific questions buyers type into AI search.
2) Clear, Direct Answers: Use concise bullet points, tables, and short paragraphs
3) Structured Data: Use FAQ and article schema so AI can clearly read and quote your page as a verified source
4) Brand Consensus: Ensure your brand's messaging is consistent across your website , review sites, social media, and third-party mentions.
1) AI Visibility Tracking: monitors your brand across major AI Engines for share of voice, sentiment, and brand recogniztion.
2) Competitor Benchmarking: input your competitor's brand name to see how often they are cited in AI vs. your company's number of citations for a given topic.
3) CRM-Powered Prompt Suggestions: instead of guessing what questions prospective buyers ask AI, Hubspot suggests prompts based on the specific search behavior of your target buyers that are stored in your CRM.
Hubspot has a number of fee-based tools to help you with AEO now for $50 a month.
Hubspot AEO Tools make the most sense when companies are already using Hubspot. It was ranked number one as the SMB to Medium Business AEO tool.
The chart above positions the AEO tools for their best applications.
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Sources: Hubspot, 2026
For more information on Marketing and leveraging AI Tools to scale quickly, contact Laurie@BayAreaInbound.com